so the root account seems absent at first, but it is always there. you can enable it by looking in netinfo manager, or by issuing a few commands at the command line.
what i really want to do with this thread is tell people how to fix their system if they screw up their netinfo databases. one way to screw them up badly is to make the stupid mistake that i did: name the admin account root. but there are many other ways that it could happen, and we should all know how to fis it.
under other UNIX systems, if you screw up the login files badly enough that the system is unusable, so that you can t loogin, or some other fatal problem, then you have to boot single user mode (off the install disk if necessary), and edit the files with your text editor.
with OSX, that won t work, because the system files (/etc/passwd, eg) by hand has no effect, because those files are not used by the system in multiuser mode. the netinfo databases are used instead.
to further complicate matters, you can t edit the netinfo databases with the regular netinfo management commands (niutil, niload, nidump) because they crash in single user mode, because the netinfo daemons don t run in single user mode. if you look at these filese, they will tell you exactly this information. they then suggest that you consult man niutil, or something. i did consult niutil, and it told me how to fix my problems, but.... like i said, niutil won t work in single user mode. so i am stuck with a system that i can t log in to if it s in multiuser mode, but i can t change the system file in singel user mode, because the command for changing the system config (niutil) won t run in swingle user mode. it is quite a chicken-egg dilemma.
but there is a command for editing the netinfo databases, which doesn t use the netinfo daemons. it is nicl. it will edit the files without consulting the daemons, and it works without complaint in single user mode. the man pages for niutil do not refer you to nicl at all, so i had no way of knowing how to edit my system if it became too screwed up to use.
i even resorted to this solution: i booted OS9, deleted all the files i could find that had anything to do with OSX, and then reinstalled OSX. but there are invisible files that i did not find, so even after completely reinstalling the OS, i still could not login. deleting all the files manually is quite a messy method, if you can get it to work at all, which i couldn t.
if i had OS9 and OSX installed on seperate partitions, i could just reformat the partition, but with the apple default install, that is not possible, i would lose vital data.. so any OSX sysadmin _must_ be aware of the emergency methods of making a system usable, and that includes editing the netinfo databases with the nicl command in single user mode.
another option would be to change lookupd to consult the flat files first, before netinfo. it would make the system much more like other UNIX systems in behavior, but you would have to manually change it for every system, since it is not the default behavior. if you had made that change though, then if things got screwed up, and you couldn t loging to the sytem, then you could just boot single user mode, and edit the files. this is exaclty how you fix broken systems under linux or solaris or any other UNIX system. i think from now on that is how i will manage my systems (since i will never use the great functionality that netinfo has to offer). if you don t use any directory services, then you might consider following my example, although i think these netinfo directory servidces have some cool features that i schould try to take advantage of.
anyway, read man nicl. maybe i will put a step by step manual up here on how to make your system functional again after you have screwed it up too badly. remember that if you screw it up to only a little extent, it may still be bootable, and you can login, but all applications appear as folders, and the fix that apple suggests for fixing this problem does not work at all, and has no effect. then nicl in single user mode is for you