Using Radmind

Appendix. Using Radmind

Radmind is a client/server system for maintaining UNIX systems, including Mac OS X. It is from the Research Systems UNIX Group of the University of Michigan. The Macintosh version can be run entirely within a graphical user interface, within a command-line interface, or using a combination of both.

Radmind runs on the client using a tripwire-like mechanism that detects changes to file system objects (such as files, directories, links), and creates a transcript of any objects that did not pass the integrity check. Any files that have changed can be retrieved from a Radmind server and replaced on the client, restoring the system to its previous state.

If the transcript contains new files that you'd like to keep on the client, the new files can be uploaded to your Radmind server, and the transcript becomes an overload. A Radmind server easily scales to support hundreds of clients and can be based on any UNIX server. It need not be a Mac OS X Server, or even Mac OS X.

The Radmind Assistant GUI offers additional functionality such as installing the Radmind tools, configuring Radmind to run automatically, setting up your template user, and enabling lab user management shell scripts. You can also use the Radmind Assistant just to set up lab user management, even if you don't run Radmind.

Radmind, which is available at no cost under a BSD-style license, provides a good balance of benefits for maintaining multiple Mac OS X clients:

• No license fee

• File-level maintenance

• Intrusion detection

• Low network usage

• IP address or certificate-based access control

• TLS encryption

• Multiple machine configurations with different combinations of overloads