Apple Mac OS X Server (Administrator’s Guide) - Manual (Page 126)

126 Chapter 3
Local Mac OS X Computer Administration
Any user who belongs to the group “admin” in the local directory domain of any Mac OS X
computer has administrator rights on that computer.
Directory Domain Administration
When you want certain users to be able to use Workgroup Manager to manage only certain
user, group, and computer accounts residing in Apple’s directory domains, you can make
them directory domain administrators. For example, you may want to make a network
administrator the server administrator for all your classroom servers, but give individual
teachers the privileges to manage student accounts in particular directory domains.
Any user who has a user account in a directory domain can be made an administrator of
that domain.
You can control the extent to which a directory domain administrator can change account
data stored in a domain. For example, you may want to set up directory domain privileges so
that your network administrator can add and remove user accounts, but other users can
change the information for particular users. Or you may want different users to be able to
manage different groups.
When you assign directory domain administration privileges to a user, the user is added to
the admin group of the server on which the directory domain resides.
Home Directories
The location of a user’s home directory is stored in the user account. A home directory is a
folder where a user’s files and preferences are stored. Other users can see a user’s home
directory and read files in its Public folder, but they can’t (by default) access anything else in
that directory.
When you create a user in a directory domain on the network, you specify the location of the
user’s home directory on the network, and the location is stored in the user account and
used by various services, including the login window and Mac OS X managed user services.
Here are several examples of activities that use the location of the home directory:
m A user’s home directory is displayed when the user clicks Home in a Finder window or
chooses Home from the Finder’s Go menu.
m Home directories that are set up for mounting automatically in a network location, such
as /Network/Servers, appear in the Finder on the computer where the user logs in.
m System preferences and managed user settings for Mac OS X users are retrieved from
their home directories and used to set up their working environments when they log in.