Here is some brief information on Hesiod.  If you are interested in
more information, I would suggest you look at the documentation
available in the Hesiod package, which you can find at
ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/hesiod

Hesiod is a general purpose naming system.  It is layered on top of
the Internet-standard Domain Name System (DNS) using the Berkeley
Internet Name Daemon (BIND).  Hesiod will return an array of strings
of data based on a name and a type, such as a login name and PASSWD
returning a line from an /etc/passwd file, or a printer name and PCAP
returning an /etc/printcap entry.  It provides similar functionality
to Sun's Yellow Pages, but with different tradeoffs.  Hesiod is more
secure (but not really secure), scales up to larger communities, and
does not make excessive use of broadcast packets, but is somewhat more
difficult to setup and maintain.

Hesiod has been in daily use at MIT for several years, and has proved
quite reliable.  Discussions about Hesiod occur on the Internet
mailing list 'hesiod' (to be added to the mailing list, send an e-mail
message with your name and Internet e-mail address to
hesiod-request@MIT.EDU). Bugs in the current implementation of
Hesiod may be reported by sending e-mail to hesiod-bugs@MIT.EDU

For further reading, see the paper on the Winter 1988 Usenix
conference proceedings.

Hesiod is a registered trademark of MIT.