Patent ID: 7668871

Claim:
A method comprising: operating a first Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory server and a second LDAP directory server which communicate with a storage server through a network; extending an LDAP directory schema of the first LDAP directory server and the second LDAP directory server to store, at the first LDAP directory server, a first mapping of user account information from a first operating system to a second operating system, and to store, at the second LDAP directory server, a second mapping of the user account information from the second operating system to the first operating system, wherein each of the first and second LDAP directory serves retrieving the first and second mappings by searching LDAP records using user IDs, and by automatically limiting searches of the LDAP records for the user account information within a domain to which the user belongs, the domain being a subtree of a directory tree; in response to a first request from the storage server to map a Unix user's ID to a Windows account, searching for and identifying the Unix user by the first LDAP directory server with ldap.nssmap.objectClass.posixAccount and ldap.nssmap.attribute.uid, retrieving the Windows account with ldap.usermap.attribute.windowsaccount as an LDAP query attribute, and returning the Windows account, to the storage server; and in response to a second request from the storage server to map the Windows account to the Unix user, determining an identifier of the Unix user by the second LDAP directory server with ldap.usermap.windows-to-unix.objectClass and ldap.usermap.attribute.unixaccount, and returning the identifier of the Unix user, to the storage server, wherein the identifier of the Unix user determined in response to the second request is different from the Unix user's ID in the first request.