Chapter 2. Solaris Naming Services Architecture

The Solaris operating environment provides a sophisticated infrastructure that supports a variety of naming services. The architecture on which it is based is extensible and able to accommodate new naming services without the need for a rewrite of important operating system utilities that access naming services. The Solaris 8 LDAP naming service plugs into this architecture and is thus accessible to system utilities that formerly had only NIS, NIS+, and DNS available.

Reading this chapter is not an absolute requirement for deployment, but if you become familiar with some of the architectural nuances, you can better understand the deployment strategies presented in later chapters. Each naming service has its own unique characteristics which may dictate how you deploy them. Although the focus of this BluePrint is LDAP, it is helpful to understand the feature set of legacy Solaris naming services to see how this new technology compares.