eDirectory is an X.500-compatible directory servicesoftware product from NetIQ. Previously owned by Novell, the product has also been known as Novell Directory Services and sometimes referred to as NetWare Directory Services. NDS was initially released by Novell in 1993 for Netware 4, replacing the Netware bindery mechanism used in previous versions, for centrally managing access to resources on multiple servers and computers within a given network. eDirectory is a hierarchical, object oriented database used to represent certain assets in an organization in a logical tree, including organizations, organizational units, people, positions, servers, volumes, workstations, applications, printers, services, and groups to name just a few.
Features
eDirectory uses dynamic rights inheritance, which allows both global and specific access controls. Access rights to objects in the tree are determined at the time of the request and are determined by the rights assigned to the objects by virtue of their location in the tree, any security equivalences, and individual assignments. The software supports partitioning at any point in the tree, as well as replication of any partition to any number of servers. Replication between servers occurs periodically using deltas of the objects. Each server can act as a master of the information it holds. Additionally, replicas may be filtered to only include defined attributes to increase speed. The software supports referential integrity, multi-master replication, and has a modular authentication architecture. It can be accessed via LDAP, DSML, SOAP, ODBC, JDBC, JNDI, and ADSI.
When Novell first designed their directory, they decided to store large amounts of their operational server data within the directory in addition to just user account information. As a result, a typical Novell directory contains a large pool of additional objects representing the servers themselves and any software services running on those servers, such as LDAP or email software.
Storage
Versions of eDirectory prior to version 8 used a record-based database management engine called Recman, which relied on the Transaction Tracking System built into the NetWare operating system. Since version 8, eDirectory uses the FLAIM database engine. FLAIM is an open source embeddable database engine developed by Novell and released under the GPL license in 2006. This change allowed for it to be ported to other platforms such as Windows, Linux, and Unix.
