About Knowledge References; Using Referrals - Netscape DIRECTORY SERVER 6.02 - DEPLOYMENT Deployment Manual

About Knowledge References

About Knowledge References
Once you have distributed your data over several databases, you need to define the
relationship between the distributed data. You do this using knowledge references,
pointers to directory information held in different databases. The Directory Server
provides the following types of knowledge references to help you link your
distributed data into a single directory tree:
• Referrals—The server returns a piece of information to the client application
indicating that the client application needs to contact another server to fulfill
the request.
• Chaining—The server contacts other servers on behalf of the client application
and returns the combined results to the client application after finishing the
operation.
The following sections describe and compare these two types of knowledge
references in more detail.

Using Referrals

A referral is a piece of information returned by a server that tells a client
application the server to contact to proceed with an operation request. This
redirection mechanism occurs when a client application requests a directory entry
that does not exist on the local server.
Directory Server supports two types of referrals:
• A default referral
The directory returns a default referral when a client application presents a DN
for which the server does not have a matching suffix. Default referrals are
stored in the configuration file of the server. You can set a default referral for
the directory server and a separate default referral for each database.
The default referral you set for each database is done through the suffix
configuration information. When the suffix of the database is disabled, you can
configure the directory to return a default referral to client requests made to
that suffix. For more information about suffixes, refer to "About Suffixes," on
page 80. For information on configuring suffixes, refer to Netscape Directory
Server Administrator's Guide.
82 Netscape Directory Server Deployment Guide • May 2002