| Certification Objective 11.01—Understanding Naming Services As you learned in the previous chapters, we build computer networks to share
resources. To do that the computers need some network information, necessary to
communicate over the network and to share the resources. In principle, each
machine can maintain its own information and the information about other
machines and resources on the network locally. Still, this can be a cumbersome
task and can lead to errors. Suppose you just installed a printer on the
network; you then need to enter information about it individually on all the
machines on the network. If information about one machine changes, you must
update this information on all the machines individually. So it's not only a
cumbersome task—the consistency is also at risk. This is where naming services
come into the picture by offering centralized management of network information
such as machine addresses, user names, passwords, access permissions, printer
names, and so forth. Furthermore, naming services simplify machine addressing,
by allowing you to refer to the machines with names that are easy to remember
rather than numerical addresses such as IP address. The Solaris system supports
a number of naming services. | 
