Solaris Naming Administration Guide


Different name services are often embedded in different applications and services in a computing environment. Working with different name services presents significant difficulties to the application developer. Most applications are designed to use a single name service and have very limited access to objects in a distributed computing environment. Because different applications use different name services they expect names to be composed differently. They often use different names for what the user considers very similar objects. For example, you might be able to send mail to your friend Johanna using her name johanna@admin.doc.com, but be required to use another name, jsmith@altair, to access her calendar.

FNS, Sun's implementation of the XFN standard, allows you to name objects in a uniform way, yet still provide the functionality that applications and developers need.

Note -

In this manual it is important to distinguish between XFN and FNS. The FNS policies include some extensions to XFN policies, and these are explicitly defined with notes. Objects belonging to the XFN programming interface are designated as XFN objects to avoid confusion with other programming interfaces.