Towards a universal directory service

Directory services and name servers have been discussed and implemented for a number of distributed systems. Most have been tightly interwoven with the particular distributed systems of which they are a part: a few are more general in nature. In this paper we survey recent work in this area and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a number of approaches. From this, we are able to extract some fundamental requirements of a naming system capable of handling a wide variety of object types in a heterogeneous environment. We outline how these requirements can be met in a universal directory service.