NIS+ Domains and FNS Organizational Units

FNS names organization, user, and host enterprise objects within NIS+ which is the preferred Solaris enterprise name service. An NIS+ domain is comprised of logical collections of users and machines and information about them, arranged to reflect some form of hierarchical organizational structure within an enterprise.

FNS is implemented on NIS+ by mapping NIS+ domains to FNS organizations. An organizational unit name corresponds to a NIS+ domain name and is identified using either the fully qualified form of its NIS+ domain name, or its NIS+ domain name relative to the NIS+ root. The top of the FNS organizational namespace is mapped to the NIS+ root domain and is accessed using the name org/ from the initial context.

In NIS+, users and hosts have a notion of a home domain. A host or user's home domain is the NIS+ domain that maintains information associated with them. A user or host's home domain can be determined directly using its NIS+ principal name. An NIS+ principal name is composed of the atomic user (login) name or the atomic host name and the name of the NIS+ home domain. For example, the user sekou with home domain doc.com. has an NIS+ principal name sekou.doc.com and the machine name vega has an NIS+ principal name vega.doc.com.

A user's NIS+ home domain corresponds to the user's FNS organizational unit. Similarly, a host's home domain corresponds to its FNS organizational unit.