Fully Qualified Domain Name

One big difference between an LDAP client and a NIS or NIS+ client is that it always returns a FQDN (fully qualified domain name) (similar to those returned by DNS). For example, if your domain name is engineering.example.net and you lookup the hostname server with getipnodebyname() (as they should in preparation for the conversion to IPv6 even though LDAP in this release only runs over IPv4). Both gethostbyname() and getipnodebyname() return the FQDN version server.engineering.example.net. Also if you use interface specific aliases like server-# you will see a long list of fully-qualified host names returned,

If you are using hostnames to share file systems or have other such checks you need to realize this key difference and account for it. Especially if you assume non-FQDN for local hosts and FQDN only for remote (DNS resolved) hosts. If you setup LDAP with a different domain name from DNS you might be surprised when the same host has two different FQDNs, depending on the lookup source.