Rebecca’s Mini now has Leopard. The install went flawlessly, unlike that of my MacBook Pro (end result: dead laptop) and my iMac (two lockups and a bunch of trashed settings).

After the bad experience with LDAP on my iMac I half expected the Mini to refuse to allow me to log in.

I should have been fully expecting it.

Luckily I was able to ssh to the machine as I’d put a DSA key in /var/root/.ssh/authorized_keys. I was then able to create a local admin user so I could log on at the console and repair the LDAP settings with the GUI. Once again "repair" means delete and add again as there was nothing wrong with them.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t have a local account it’s simply because I had renamed it to maling some time ago when I was playing with NetInfo (now obsolete, of course) and then deleted it when the machine became LDAPped.

    dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/admin
    dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/admin PrimaryGroupID 20
    dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/admin NFSHomeDirectory /Users/admin
    dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/admin UniqueID 501
    dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/admin UserShell /bin/bash
    dscl localhost -append /Local/Default/Groups/admin GroupMembership admin