- Evolution of Solaris Naming Services
- NIS and Files Coexistence
- NIS and DNS Coexistence
- Solaris Naming Service Switch
- Solaris Naming Service Switch Architecture
- NIS Architecture Overview
- NIS Client Server Architecture
- How NIS Clients Bind to the NIS Server
- NIS Maps
- NIS High Availability Architecture Features
- NIS+ Architecture Overview
- NIS+ Client Server Architecture
- How NIS+ Clients Bind to the NIS+ Server
- NIS+ Tables
- NIS+ Interaction with DNS
- NIS+ High Availability Architecture Features
- Solaris DNS Architecture Overview
- DNS Client Architecture
- DNS Server Architecture
- DNS High Availability Features
- LDAP Architecture Overview
- LDAP Information Model
- LDAP Naming Model
- LDAP Functional Model
- LDAP Security Model
- LDAP Replication
- Comparison with Legacy Naming Services
DNS High Availability Features
DNS provides features for making itself more available and also features for making applications more available. Caching servers, which contain the same information and are synchronized, can be configured. Multiple IP addresses can be listed for a specific host name in a DNS record. Each time a request is made for that host, the next IP address in the list is handed out. This technique is often referred to as round robin; it is useful when a DNS client is provided with the address of an application server that is not operational because, with the round robin technique, the client will try again and get a different address.
DNS servers can be clustered to provide automatic failover of master servers, although this feature is not part of the architecture. With this technology, updates to DNS records can still be performed in case the master DNS server fails.