LDAP Namespace Structure

A directory service has two major features. First, it distributes its information base among many different servers. Second, users can access directory information by querying any of those servers. Making this work requires defining a namespace in which each object's location can be quickly determined.

Common Names

As we saw in the last section, information in an LDAP database comes in the form of objects. Objects have attributes that describe them. For example, the User object for Tom Jones would have attributes such as Tom's logon name, his password, his phone number, his email address, his department, and so forth.

When an LDAP client needs to locate information about an object, it submits a query that contains the ...

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