Special Edition Using® Solaris™ 9

Directory Services—An Overview

We all know that a directory is an index that helps people find information. The directories that are more familiar to us are probably paper-based resources, such as the telephone book. In the context of the Internet, directories are repositories of network names and other information, essential for navigating loosely structured data like you find on the Web.

Directory services help users or computers search through the directory list. These services enable you to search through a structured repository of information. Directory services can be local or global. Local directory services have a restricted context and are local to the context where they are running, whereas global directory services span over intranets ...