UNS(4)UNS(4)NAMEuns - the Unified Name Service Architecture
DESCRIPTION
The Unified Name Services Architecture is a collection of programs,
libraries, API, and caches that provide a flexible and extensible system
that is transparent to the users of the traditional Unix Service API. It
allows the administrator to fully control how name service requests are
performed on a system-wide basis. It provides a high-performance
system-wide cache and associated cache-miss daemon.
The system-wide caches are stored in mdbm(3B) format and are located in
/var/ns/cache. There is one cache file per index for each name service
map. Cache files may be viewed and manipulated via the nsadmin(1)
command. All name service requests that are not found in the cache are
then requested via the nsd(1) in memory filesystem /ns. nsd will lookup
the requested information as configured by the nsswitch.conf(4) file.
The result is returned to the requesting program and placed into the
system-wide cache for future requests. If nsd is not running, the
traditional system configuration files located in /etc will be read.
Name service requests can be configured to use a number of protocols
including files(7), dns(7), nis(7), ldap(7), mdbm(7), ndbm(7), and the
Berkeley db(7). In addition, the nisserv(7) library acts as a NIS server.
Each of these protocols is implemented in a dynamic library located in
/var/ns/lib which is used by the nsd process.
The Unified Name Service has added the new C API calls ns_lookup(3) and
ns_list(3) to allow programs to easily access the UNS functionality.
Most of the traditional name service API functions such as getpwent(3C)
and getgrent(3C) have been modified to use these new functions.
More information can be found in the various manual pages referenced
above, as well as in the Networking and Mail and Network Programming
books.
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