Determining The Administration Domain - Netscape DIRECTORY SERVER 6.2 Installation Manual

Configuration Decisions
Between your user directory and your configuration directory, it is your user
directory that will receive the overwhelming percentage of the directory traffic. For
this reason, you should give the user directory the greatest computing resources.
Because the configuration directory should receive very little traffic, it can be
installed on a machine with very low-end resources (such as a minimally-equipped
Pentium).
Also, you should use the default directory ports (389 and 636) for the user
directory. If your configuration directory is managed by a server instance
dedicated to that purpose, you should use some non-standard port for the
configuration directory.
You cannot install a user directory until you have installed a configuration
directory somewhere on your network.

Determining the Administration Domain

The administration domain allows you to logically group Netscape servers
together so that you can more easily distribute server administrative tasks. A
common scenario is for two divisions in a company to each want control of their
individual Netscape servers. However, you may still want some centralized
control of all the servers in your enterprise. Administration domains allow you
to meet these conflicting goals.
Administration domains have the following qualities:
• All servers share the same configuration directory, regardless of the domain
they belong to.
• Servers in two different domains may use two different user directories for
authentication and user management.
• The configuration directory administrator has complete access to all
installed Netscape servers, regardless of the domain that they belong to.
• Each administration domain can be configured with an administration domain
owner. This owner has complete access to all the servers in the domain but
does not have access to the servers in any other administration domain.
• The administration domain owner can grant individual users administrative
access on a server by server basis within the domain.
18 Netscape Directory Server Installation Guide • December 2003