Tarantella Administration Guide > Before you begin > The Tarantella datastore and Tarantella Federated Naming

The Tarantella datastore and Tarantella Federated Naming

The Tarantella datastore is the sum of all the information used by the various components of Tarantella. The datastore includes:

• Information about hosts and users on the network.
• Tarantella session information.
• Organizational information you provide.

The diverse sources of this information are all accessed in the same way, using TFN (Tarantella Federated Naming) names.

Each object in the datastore has a unique TFN name. TFN names include a component identifying the source of the information: the namespace. TFN names commonly have this form:

.../namespace/name-within-namespace

The ... indicates the "root" of TFN. Each namespace may use a different naming scheme. The namespace part of the TFN name acts as a "gateway" to that naming scheme.

For example, an object in the ENS organizational hierarchy might have this name:

.../_ens/o=Indigo Insurance/ou=Marketing/cn=Cust-o-Dat

The _ens indicates the ENS part of the datastore: the ENS namespace. Within ENS, the object's name is o=Indigo Insurance/ou=Marketing/cn=Cust-o-Dat, indicating an object with common name Cust-o-Dat, belonging to the organizational unit Marketing, which in turn belongs to the organization Indigo Insurance.

Other namespaces might use a different naming scheme. For example, a similar object stored on an LDAP directory server might have this name:

.../_ldap/cn=Cust-o-Dat,ou=Marketing,o=Indigo Insurance

Here the order of the hierarchy is reversed, and is comma-separated rather than slash-separated. However, the syntax is different only within the LDAP namespace.

Why do TFN names matter?

Some command-line tools for configuring Tarantella require you to name objects to work with. In many cases the flexibility of Tarantella means you can name objects from many different parts of the datastore.

For example, if you're using tarantella passcache to add a new password cache entry, you need to name the resource you're caching the password for. This might be the name of an ENS host object or a DNS name, for example. In both cases you need to give the name that Tarantella uses: the TFN name.

Commonly used namespaces