Introduction to FNS and XFN Policies

XFN defines policies for naming objects in the federated namespace. The goals of these policies are

• To allow easy and uniform composition of names

• To promote coherence in naming across applications and services

• To provide a simple, yet sufficiently rich, set of policies so that applications need not invent and implement ad hoc policies for specific environments

• To enhance an application's portability

• To promote cross-platform interoperability in heterogeneous computing environments

What FNS Policies Specify

FNS policies contain all the XFN policies plus extensions for the Solaris environment.

Computing environments now offer worldwide scope and a large range of services. Users expect to have access to services at every level of the computing environment. FNS policies provide a common framework for the three levels of services: global, enterprise, and application.

FNS provides to applications a set of policies on how name services are arranged and used:

• Policies that specify how to federate the enterprise namespace so that it is accessible in the global namespace.

• Policies that specify the names and bindings present in the initial context of every process.

• Name service policies for enterprise objects: organizations, hosts, users, sites, files, and services.

• Policies that define the relationships among the organization, host, user, site, files, and service enterprise objects.

• Policies that specify the syntax of names used to refer to those enterprise objects.

What FNS Policies Do Not Specify

The FNS policies do not specify:

• The actual names used within name services.

• Naming within applications. Application-level naming is left to individual applications or groups of related applications.

• The attributes to use once the object has been named.