RFC 2307 (rfc2307) - Page 2 of 21
An Approach for Using LDAP as a Network Information Service
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2307 Using LDAP as a Network Information Service March 1998 netgroups, booting information (boot parameters and MAC address mappings), filesystem mounts, IP hosts and networks, and RFC 822 mail aliases. Resolution requests are made through a set of C functions, provided in the UNIX system's C library. For example, the UNIX system utility "ls", which enumerates the contents of a filesystem directory, uses the C library function getpwuid() in order to map user IDs to login names. Once the request is made, it is resolved using a "nameservice" which is supported by the client library. The nameservice may be, at its simplest, a collection of files in the local filesystem which are opened and searched by the C library. Other common nameservices include the Network Information Service (NIS) and the Domain Name System (DNS). (The latter is typically used for resolving hosts, services and networks.) Both these nameservices have the advantage of being distributed and thus permitting a common set of entities to be shared amongst many clients. LDAP is a distributed, hierarchical directory service access protocol which is used to access repositories of users and other network- related entities. Because LDAP is often not tightly integrated with the host operating system, information such as users may need to be kept both in LDAP and in an operating system supported nameservice such as NIS. By using LDAP as the the primary means of resolving these entities, these redundancy issues are minimized and the scalability of LDAP can be exploited. (By comparison, NIS services based on flat files do not have the scalability or extensibility of LDAP or X.500.) The object classes and attributes defined below are suitable for representing the aforementioned entities in a form compatible with LDAP and X.500 directory services. 2. General Issues 2.1. Terminology The key words "MUST", "SHOULD", and "MAY" used in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC 2119]. For the purposes of this document, the term "nameservice" refers to a service, such as NIS or flat files, that is used by the operating system to resolve entities within a single, local naming context. Contrast this with a "directory service" such as LDAP, which supports extensible schema and multiple naming contexts. Howard Experimental
