| The main advantage to using managed network views is that your clients can see a hierarchical view of your network resources rather than a flat view. Before implementing network views, you'll want to do some planning and organization. Here are some suggestions for tasks to do prior to creating your network views: Gather a list of all your network file servers and the URLs that clients use to access them, such as afp://fileserver.osxit.com/. Categorize all of your file servers into logical groupings. You may also wish to create groups of groupings. Categorize all of your client computers, and determine which groups of file servers should be shown to each group of client computers. Determine if you'd like your client machines to see only the network resources you list, or whether they should be able to browse to other network resources.
You may categorize some computers by the room they're in, by the skill level of their users, or by restrictions on what the users can do. Your organization might have hundreds of servers, but a given group of users might need to connect to only a few of those servers. You'll quickly discover that this is the case for most of your users. Understanding Network Views There are three types of network views: Named view Default view Public view
When a Mac OS X machine is turned on, it will search the directory servers for an appropriate network view in this order: 1. | If there is a computer record present in the directory and it has a network view associated with it, the computer will use that network view.
| 2. | Next, the computer will search every directory server in the search path (as defined in Directory Access) for a Named view that matches the computer.
| 3. | If there is still no network view available, the computer will search every directory server in the search path for a view named Default.
| 4. | Failing that, the computer will search through every directory server it knows about, including those not found in the Directory Access search path, for a view named Public. Each one it finds will be displayed in a folder named after the server.
| 5. | If no Public views are found on the directory servers, the computer will search for views named Default on all of the directory servers, including those not found in the search path. Each one it finds will be displayed in a folder named after the server.
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If all of these efforts fail, the computer will default to its original flat view. Matching Named Views When searching for a matching Named view, the client computer will search for each of the following, in this order, until a match is found: A view whose name matches the Ethernet MAC address of this computer. A view whose name matches the IP address of this computer. A view whose name contains a subnet description that contains this computer.
Subnet descriptions are in standard CIDR notation, such as 192.168.15.0/24. Understanding a Network View Each network view can contain many objects consisting of three types of entries: Neighborhood A neighborhood acts like a folder. It is simply a collection of other computers, dynamic lists, or even other neighborhoods. Computer A computer is any computer on the network that accepts remote file service connections. Dynamic List A dynamic list is a list of network resources generated dynamically on the server, based on the computers seen from a specific group of computers. The contents of a dynamic list will depend on the service discovery configuration of the server for AppleTalk, Bonjour, SLP, and SMB/CIFS discovery protocols.
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