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Directory: Like a phone book, a network directory is organized by some set of criteria, such as site or country. Within those units of organization are objects: For networks you would find servers and users, whereas in a phone book you would find names. Once the object is located, you can obtain details about it. In a phone book, this would be an address or phone number; on a network, this would be a user name, password, location and so on.

NDS (Novell Directory Services): A directory-based naming service that organizes network resources into a hierarchical structure. Users, groups, servers, workstations, drive volumes, policies and the like are organized in tree-like branches, called organizational units. There are many benefits to this type of X.500-based organization, including:

• Allowance for redundancy: Each organizational unit of the NDS directory can be partitioned and mirrored on various servers, resulting in both redundancy of the directory and efficiency of its use.

• Decentralized maintenance: Each organizational unit in the NDS tree/hierarchy can be responsible only for its local part of the directory, so updates and maintenance can be done instantly.

• Logical organization: Objects are organized in a logical hierarchical manner, making organization and maintenance much more easily understood.

• Powerful searching capabilities: NDS provides powerful searching facilities that let users construct arbitrarily complex queries.

• Single global name space: Much like the DNS, NDS provides a single homogeneous name space to users. The NDS name space is more flexible and expandable than that in DNS.

NWAdmin: NDS originally offered this Windows-based utility to administer all objects within the NDS database; however, since ConsoleOne's inception as a replacement for NWAdmin, several items can be administered only via ConsoleOne.

Replicas: NDS allows for copies of any given partition. The first copy of any partition's database is called the master replica. Additional replicas can be placed on various servers as read-only or read/write. When a server contains a replica of a partition higher in the tree (parent) but not a replica of any partitions directly below it (child), a subordinate reference is created automatically for forward reference to those items.