About the Integration of Mac OS X Devices into a Centrally Managed UNIX Environment

The UNIX flavors in use today have so much in common that centralized management of UNIX systems has become almost standard. Since Mac OS X is based on BSD-UNIX it is a promising candidate for integration into a centrally managed UNIX environment.

Starting from generic administration concepts, this paper develops an integrated management concept that handles fully automated installation and configuration of hosts. The concept includes a centralized application management system for console and graphical Mac OS X app

The management concept is then implemented based exclusively on standard UNIX tools. The necessary extensions of these tools to make Mac OS X conform to UNIX standards are presented, including a proxy tool to forward AppleEvents which facilitate the interprocess communication for centrally managed graphical Mac OS X applications.