Naming Service

Naming services store information in a central place that users, workstations, and applications must have to communicate across the networks. This information includes:

• Machine (host) names and addresses
• User names
• Passwords
• Group membership, and so on.

Without a central name service, each workstation would have to maintain its own copy of this information which makes it extremely expensive to administer large networks. Name service information can be stored in files, database tables and so on.