Ganymede: An Extensible and Customizable Directory Management Framework

In the fall of 1994, Applied Research Laboratories, The University of Texas at Austin (ARL:UT) presented a paper [1] at LISA VIII, describing work that we had performed designing and implementing a management framework for NIS and DNS, called GASH. In the years since that paper was presented, it has become clear that the design of GASH was insufficient to meet the complex, idiosyncratic, and rapidly changing needs of modern networking. GASH suffered from being too inflexible to be rapidly retooled for a changing network environment, from being limited to a single user at a time, and from being unable to provide management services to custom clients.

In the face of these issues, the Computer Science Division at ARL:UT went back to the drawing board and developed a Java-based directory management framework on the basis of the design principles presented in our GASH paper. Written in Java, Ganymede (which stands for The "GAsh Network Manager, Deluxe Edition," of course) is based on a distributed object design using the Java Remote Method Invocation [2] protocol and features a multi-threaded, multi-user server, and a graphical, explorer-style client. By supporting customization through a graphical schema editor, plug-in Java classes, and external build scripts, Ganymede is able to support a variety of directory services, including NIS, DNS, LDAP, and even NT user and group management.