Despite not understanding the architecture completely, it sounds like LDAP will fill your needs.
Have a read of the following man pages to see if it's what you're after:
slapd-ldap slapo-translucent slapo-chain
Good luck!
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From: Yang Sun [mailto:aegir.china@yahoo.com.cn] Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 10:59 PM To: openldap-software@openldap.org Subject: LDAP Reference Works? Hi, I am new to LDAP world. And I am trying to design a distribute data structure for storing the user information in our project. I am not sure whether using ldap reference is the right way to do this job. Please give me some suggestion. The detailed situation is: We manage tens of sites. And the sites are orgnized in a tree structure. The requirement is to store the information in the local site (means no central place to store the information for all the sites). It will give the system the maximum flexiblity to expand and when the site is isolated the local site still works well. Sometimes, the local site will need information stored in other sites. I think it is a distribute database architecture. And it reminds me to use the LDAP reference function. So each local site will have a reference to its parent site and some references to its child sites. It gives a logical view of the tree with information for all the sites. I am not sure whether it is possible to do that and whether it has some difficulties to implement it using OpenLDAP. Any suggestion? Thanks, Yang Sun