Solaris Common Desktop Environment: User's Guide

Using Federated Naming with Calendar

If your site uses Federated Naming Service (FNS), calendar naming can be location independent: you can name a calendar without including its host machine. For example, to name the calendar of user jsmith without FNS, you need to enter jsmith@hostmachine; with FNS you can enter jsmith alone.

The default behavior of Calendar is unchanged; you can name calendars using the form username@hostname. To use the new way of naming calendars, you need to set the resource useFNS. You can turn this resource on either manually by editing your .desksetdefaults file or through the Display Settings dialog box. (Choose Options from the File menu and Display Settings from the Category options menu in the Options dialog box. Click the Calendar Names: Use Federated Naming checkbox and then click OK.)

Calendar Naming

When the useFNS feature is on, you can use both the old and new ways of naming calendars. When you choose Show Other Calendar from the Browse menu, you can enter simply rosanna to browse user rosanna's calendar. Or you could enter rosanna@alto to name the calendar directly. The new names can be entered wherever a calendar name is expected (Show Other Calendar, Initial Calendar View in Display Settings Options, Browse list editor, Browse short list, and so on).

For location-independent naming to work, there must be a name space that holds registered information about where the calendars are.

Calendar Registration

When you run Calendar with useFNS set on, Calendar will automatically attempt to register your calendar into the name space. Once it has been registered, someone can use just your username to browse your calendar. If you subsequently move your calendar, change the User Calendar Location in theDisplay Settings dialog box and the registered calendar address in the name space will automatically be updated the next time you restart Calendar. You can also update the information in the name space outside Calendar using the FNS command, fnbind.

In an NIS environment, auto-registration is not supported because NIS does not support dynamic updates of arbitrary data. In addition, fnbind only succeeds when run by root on the NIS master.

Naming Service Dependencies

In Solaris 2.5 Operating Environment or compatible versions, FNS works with NIS+ only.

Build Dependencies

For CDE developers that build dtcm, you need to have the appropriate FNS package installed on the build machine. For a Solaris 2.5 or earlier target, you need to have the Solaris 2.5 SUNWfns package. These packages can be picked up from the OSNet gates (/ws/on297-gate/packages, for example) or from the packages directory of a specific Solaris release.

Runtime Dependencies

If dtcm cannot locate the appropriate SUNWfns package at runtime, it will simply not use FNS. Calendar can always run on a system without the SUNWfns package.