I'm guessing some sort of auditing or routing functionality. For instance, you have debug logs going to some development server and login events going to so aud

I'm guessing some sort of auditing or routing functionality. For instance, you have debug logs going to some development server and login events going to so audit server. I don't have experience with this feature but there's similar use cases in log shipping utilities like fluentd Edit: I read the other link and it looks like some sort of poorly designed RPC functionality or something shrug Edit 2: Reading https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/jndi/jndi-rmi.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/jndi/..., it sounds like it's a form of service discover of sorts. You talk to a registry server and it provides some object pointing to the real destination