IV: Maintaining Your Directory Service
| Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services > 2. A Brief History of Directories |
Chapter 2. A Brief History of DirectoriesDirectory services have recently emerged as an essential part of the network infrastructure. In the past few years , LDAP-based directory services in particular have captured the hearts and minds of many information systems professionals, application software developers, and end users. However, LDAP owes a great debt to all the other directory services and related developments that led up to its creation. In this chapter we present a brief and necessarily incomplete history of directory services. The emphasis is on developments that are interesting and note-worthy and on the ideas that led directly to the birth and subsequent dominance of LDAP. Our goal in this chapter is to complement the technical information provided in the rest of this book by providing some historical context in which to view LDAP. Note that we do not present events in strict chronological order, so please refer to the time line located near the end of this chapter to see an ordered view of the major directory-related events. Our look at the history of directories is divided into five major sections:
Each of the first four sections describes a different type of directory service, differentiated both by the needs each service was designed to meet and when it was developed. For each directory type, we describe important related historical developments and also examine the current status of such directories. LDAP itself falls within the fourth section (general-purpose, standards-based directories), so that section is much larger than the others. In the fifth section, we take a brief look at the future of directory services.
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Index terms contained in this sectiondirectorieshistory of 2nd history of directories 2nd |
| 2002, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 245