FNS and NIS+ Naming

If you are not familiar with NIS+ and its terminology, refer to Part 1 and Glossary of this guide. You will find it helpful to be familiar with the structure of a typical NIS+ environment.

NIS+ is the preferred enterprise-wide information service in the Solaris environment. Both NIS and local files can be used along with NIS+. NIS+ allows an enterprise to be divided into hierarchical organizational levels composed of domains and subdomains.

FNS organization units correspond to NIS+ domains and subdomains. There is one orgunit context for each domain and subdomain.

FNS federates NIS+, NIS, and local files to support naming policies in the Solaris environment. To do this, FNS provides the XFN interface for performing naming operations on organization, site, user, and host objects. It implements these operations using the appropriate programming interface for accessing files, directories, and tables.

Under NIS+, FNS context and attribute data is stored in NIS+ type tables. These tables are stored in NIS+ type directory objects named ctx_dir. There is an ctx_dir directory object for each NIS+ domain and subdomain, residing at the same level as the domain's groups_dir and org_dir directory objects. Thus, the directory object ctx_dir.sales.doc.com. contains FNS tables which store FNS context and attribute data for the sales.doc.com domain.

Under NIS+, you use FNS and NIS+ commands to work with the information in FNS tables. Do not edit these tables directly or manipulate them with UNIX commands.