Towards a Universal Directory Service.

Abstract

Directory services and name servers have been discussed and implemented for a number of distributed systems. Most have been tightly interwoven with the particular distributed systems of which they are a part; a few are more general in nature. In this paper we survey recent work in this area and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a number of approaches. From this, we are able to extract some fundamental requirements of a naming system capable of handling a wide variety of object types in a heterogeneous environment. We outline how these requirements can be met in a universal directory service. In this paper we address a universal directory service that: can span a heterogeneous internetwork of existing naming domains; allows us to name, locate, and discover how to manipulate objects (including files, processes, mailboxes, people, and services); provides dynamic binding and context mechanisms; and can be integrated into most existing systems as a 'value-added' feature.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 1985
Accession Number
ADA166947

Entities

People

  • Bruce L. Hitson
  • Judy L. Edighoffer
  • Keith A. Lantz

Organizations

  • Stanford University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Availability
  • Computer Access Control
  • Computer Communications
  • Computer Networks
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Databases
  • Directories
  • Distributed Computing
  • Environment
  • Identities
  • Local Area Networks
  • Network Architecture
  • Operating Systems
  • Servers (Computer Hardware)

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking