Book Image

The macOS User Administration Guide

By : Herta Nava
Book Image

The macOS User Administration Guide

By: Herta Nava

Overview of this book

Apple is pushing the capabilities of its technologies to help users achieve high performance, including improvements in its OS running across all Mac systems, macOS, and new technologies such as M1 Silicon chips. This book walks you through macOS from a system administration and support point of view, exploring its latest features. The book starts by explaining macOS architecture, installation, and startup processes to enable you to get started with the OS. You'll learn how to manage users and discover techniques for user security and privacy. Moving on, you'll get to grips with the macOS file system and learn to manage disks, volumes, and partitions for effective file management. Most of the examples covered in this book are from an administrator's perspective; however, when relevant, a standard user's perspective is also presented. You'll find illustrations for Mac systems running macOS 11 (Big Sur), and when necessary, for macOS 10.15 (macOS Catalina). Finally, you'll explore advanced topics such as networking and using command-line tools for administration tasks. By the end of this macOS book, you'll be well-versed with macOS features, administration tasks, and best practices. You'll also be able to apply the concepts to increase your chances of success in obtaining Apple certifications such as Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP).
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
18
About Packt

Exploring the industry standards used by macOS

macOS is compatible with the most relevant industry standards: two of the most important ones are multicast DNS (mDNS) for networking and the Swift programming language. Let's briefly describe each of them.

Multicast DNS

mDNS is a technology developed to facilitate IP networking configuration. It's related to a concept you have probably already heard of: zero-configuration networking, or zeroconf. We know zeroconf in Mac as the Bonjour protocol created by Apple to facilitate device configuration for local networks.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) maintains the mDNS standard. The technical definition of mDNS, as stated in IETF's RFC document, is the following: "Clients performing DNS-like queries for DNS-like resource records by sending DNS-like UDP query and response messages over IP Multicast to UDP port 5353."

While that might sound like a mouthful, what's important about this technology is that...