Federated Naming Service Programming Guide

The Federated Naming Service Programming Guide provides support for flexible composition of different, autonomous naming systems into a single service, accessible using a single, simple naming system interface. Federated Naming Service (FNS) facilitates coherent naming by encouraging the use of common naming policies. These interfaces and policies are shared by systems and applications, such as the file service and print service, to provide a coherent view of the global and enterprise-wide namespaces in the Solaris environment.

FNS exports the XFN X/Open( Federated Naming) programming interface and policies, an open standard actively supported by other vendors. This enhances the portability of applications that use FNS. FNS consists of XFN libraries, administration tools, and a set of XFN-conformant naming systems implemented using NIS+ for naming organizations, users, hosts, sites, services, and files within the enterprise.