General Considerations

The following summary is intended as a quick reference. It summarizes some useful command and discusses some of the special features of Mac OS X.

Basic Skills

You will need some basic skills. In general, you should be familiar with the following

Using the terminal to execute shell commands
Basic system administration: paths, logins, etc.

The following provide more details.

Mac OS X for Unix Geeks, Brian Jepson and Ernest Rothman.
Linux in a Nutshell, 4th Edition. Ellen Siever, Stephen Figgins, Aaron Weber

Administrator

You will need to perform some commands as a priviledged user. OS X lets a user with administrator privileges access some files such as those in /Library. Some actions you must perform as the superuser. Your options are

log on as root (use NetInfo Manager Security/Enable Root User)
use the sudo command (preferred in BSD)

You might edit a system file as follows.


	shell: sudo vi /etc/csh.login
	Password: you passwork
	.... perform edit session ....
	:wq

If you are not up to vi, edit the file with a text editor such as BBEdit, save it as text in a writeable folder and then copy with


	sudo  cp  csh.login  /etc

Symbolic Links

It generally simplifies administration to have clients refer to resources with a generic name (mysql-connector-java.jar) rather the specific version (mysql-connector-java-3.0.9-stable-bin.jar). To update the component one changes the link rather that editing each myriad client configurations.

The command for the link is


  ln -s  target-actual-file   link-name-that-points-to-target

for example


 sudo ln -s mysql-connector-java-3.0.9-stable-bin.jar mysql-connector-java.jar

Note that the Mac alias mechanism does not provide the required symbolic link.

Directory Layout

There are a myriad ways one can install components. The following summarizes some typical approaches. It also identifies the OS X strategy.

/System/Library OS X This is where the generic system-wide resources are placed. A prudent policy is to leave this for Apple and other experts manage it.
/Library OS X This contains system-wide resources for your particular computer. This is where you will want to put most of your system wilde items. The following discusses some important subfolders.
/Library/Java OS X The OS X install creates this with a two subfolders.

/Library/Java/Home: This links to the Java installation in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework
/Library/Java/Extension: This is created as empty folded. This is where we will want to place resoucres that we need for our Java app.

/Library/StartupItems OS X This is where we place instructions to start and stop applications for OS X. Other flavours of Unix use a different mechanism. For example Red Hat uses /etc/rc.
/usr/local /usr contains Unix System Resources. The /usr/local contains resources for the particular installation. This is where mysql wants to go.
/etc /etc contains core configuration files.
/opt This is my preferred directory for installing web services in linux.
/var /var/log contains log information. Some unix installations also place the MySql data in /var.
home Your home directory a number of hidden files that start with "." The following are useful for configuration. Mac OS X uses the TENEX C Shell tcsh as default

.tcshrc Executed each time you start a cshell. Thus you may wish to avoid using recursive commands such as set path = ( "$HOME/bin" $path )
.login Executed each time you launch a login shell. This includes openening a terminal.
.my.cnf Directions for MySql

Note:The Mac finder usually does not show directories such as /etc. Use the Go/Go to Folder menu item in the finder.

Environment Variables

There are a numer of environment variables that we will need to set. The example takes the strategy of setting them to the administrator login rather than the general user.

path PATH	The search path for executables. `set path = ( $path "/Library/JSWP/Home/bin" ) (C shell) export path setenv JAVA_HOME "/Library/Java/Home" (C shell)`
JAVA_HOME	Location of Java for Ant. `setenv JAVA_HOME "/Library/Java/Home" (C shell)`
CLASSPATH	Search path for searching Java Classes
CATALINA_HOME	location of Cataline/Tomcat web container
ANT_HOME	Location of ant