Parent distinguished name

A parent distinguished name (DN) is an entry in a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory server namespace. LDAP server entries are arranged in a hierarchical structure that could reflect political, geographic, organizational, or domain boundaries. A distinguished name is considered a parent DN when the DN is the directory entry immediately superior to a given DN.

An example of a complete distinguished name could be cn=Tim Jones, o=IBM, c=US. Each entry has at least one attribute that is used to name the entry. This naming attribute is called the relative distinguished name (RDN) of the entry. The entry above a given RDN is called its parent distinguished name. In this example, cn=Tim Jones names the entry, so it is the RDN. o=IBM, c=US is the parent DN for cn=Tim Jones.

Enterprise Identity Mapping (EIM) uses a directory server as a domain controller for storing EIM domain data. The parent DN combined with the EIM domain name determines the location of EIM domain data in the directory server namespace. When you use the EIM Configuration wizard to create and join a new domain, you can choose to specify a parent DN for the domain that you are creating. By using a parent DN, you can specify where in the LDAP namespace that EIM data should reside for the domain. When you do not specify a parent DN, EIM data resides in its own suffix in the namespace and the default location of the EIM domain data is ibm-eimDomainName=EIM.