While much of the work of FS involves sending requests to other Critical Path application services, some data is sent directly to the User Profile Store or the White Pages directory. A further background service called the Locator is used to coordinate the various services.
The UPS provides a central repository for the Critical Path application services to share common domain and user information, such as user credentials, preferences, and resource data.
WPS provides a central repository for public information about users, such as electronic mail addresses, telephone numbers and postal addresses, allowing you to locate a user by name (like the white pages of a telephone directory).
The Locator is a data store and corresponding set of libraries for locating a resource or application service in a distributed environment. Within the Locator store is an area called the Physical Environment Description (PED), which holds the connection details for each of the application and directory services.
The structure of each of these directories is defined by the UPSv2 schema. For a more detailed explanation of the directory services and an outline of the UPSv2 schema, see the
Directory Server Administration Guide.
