NIS+ Environment

In an NIS+ environment, organizational units correspond to NIS+ domains and subdomains.

Under NIS+, organization units must map to domains and subdomains. You must have an organizational unit for each NIS+ domain and subdomain. You cannot have "logical" organization units within a domain or subdomain. In other words, you cannot divide an NIS+ domain or subdomain into smaller organization units. Thus, if you have a NIS+ domain doc.com. and two subdomains sales.doc.com. and manf.doc.com., you must have three FNS organizational units corresponding to those three domains.

Organizational units are named using dot-separated right-to-left compound names, where each atomic element names an organizational unit within a larger unit. For example, the name org/sales.doc.com. names an organizational unit sales within a larger unit named doc.com. In this example, sales is an NIS+ subdomain of doc.com.

Organizational unit names can be either fully qualified NIS+ domain names or relatively named NIS+ names. Fully qualified names have a terminal dot; relative names do not. Thus, if a terminal dot is present in the organization name, the name is treated as a fully qualified NIS+ domain name. If there is no terminal dot, the organization name is resolved relative to the top of the organizational hierarchy. For example, orgunit/west.sales.doc.com. is a fully qualified name identifying the west organization unit, and _orgunit/west.sales is a relatively qualified name identifying the same subdomain.