Distributed File

Systems

Department of
Computer Science & Engineering

www.cambridge.edu.in
 Distributed File Systems
• A file service enables programs to store and access remote
files exactly as they do local ones, allowing users to access
their files from any computer in an intranet.

• Distributed file systems support the sharing of information in

the form of files and hardware resources in the form of
persistent storage throughout an intranet.

• A well-designed file service provides access to files stored at a

server with performance and reliability similar to, and in some
cases better than, files stored on local disks.
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 Storage systems and their properties

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 Characteristics of file systems

• File systems are responsible for the organization, storage,

retrieval, naming, sharing and protection of files.
• Files contain both data and attributes:
-The data consist of a sequence of data items (typically
8-bit byteFiles contain s), accessible by operations to read
and write any portion of the sequence.
-The attributes are held as a single record containing
information such as the length of the file, timestamps, file
type, owner’s identity and access control lists.

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 File attribute record structure

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File System operations
 Distributed file system requirements
• Transparency
o Access transparency
o Location transparency
o Mobility transparency
o Performance transparency
o Scaling transparency
• Concurrent file updates
• File replication

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 Distributed file system requirements

• Hardware and operating system heterogeneity

• Fault tolerance
• Consistency
• Security
• Efficiency

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 File Service Architecture

The file service has three components –

• a flat file service,
• a directory service and
• a client module.

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 File Service Architecture

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 Flat file service interface

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 Directory service interface

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 Name Services
• Name service is a distinct service that is used by client processes to
obtain attributes such as the addresses of resources or objects
when given their names.
• The entities named can be of many types, and they may be
managed by different services.
• For example, name services are often used to hold the addresses
and other details of users, computers, network domains, services
and remote objects.

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 Names, addresses and other attributes

• Any process that requires access to a specific resource must

possess a name or an identifier for it.
• The term identifier is sometimes used to refer to names that are
interpreted only by programs.
• Identifiers are chosen for the efficiency with which they can be
looked up and stored by software.

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 Names, addresses and other attributes
• Pure names are simply uninterpreted bit patterns.
• Non-pure names contain information about the object that they
name; in particular, they may contain information about the
location of the object.
• Pure names always have to be looked up before they can be of any
use.
• At the other extreme from a pure name is an object’s address: a
value that identifies the location of the object rather than the
object itself.
• Addresses are efficient for accessing objects, but objects can
sometimes be relocated, so addresses are inadequate as a means
of identification.
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 Names and services
• Many of the names used in a distributed system are specific to
some particular service.
For example, users of the social networking web site twitter.com,
have names such as @magmapoetry that no other service resolves.
• Names are also sometimes needed to refer to entities in a
distributed system that are beyond the scope of any single service.
The major examples of these entities are users (with proper names
and email addresses), computers (with hostnames) and services
themselves (such as file service or printer service).

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 Uniform Resource Identifiers
• Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) came about from the need to
identify resources on the Web, and other Internet resources such
as electronic mailboxes.
• URIs are ‘uniform’ in that their syntax incorporates that of
indefinitely many individual types of resource identifiers (that is,
URI schemes), and there are procedures for managing the global
namespace of schemes.
• The advantage of uniformity is that it eases the process of
introducing new types of identifier, as well as using existing types
of identifier in new contexts, without disrupting existing usage.

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 Uniform Resource Locators
• The familiar term Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is often used for
URIs that provide location information and specify the method for
accessing the resource.
• For example, http://www.cdk5.net/ identifies a web page at the
given path (‘/’) on the host www.cdk5.net, and specifies that the
HTTP protocol be used to access it.
Another example is a ‘mailto’ URL, such as
mailto:[email protected], which identifies the mailbox at the
given address.

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 Uniform Resource Locators
• URLs are efficient identifiers for accessing resources. But they
suffer from the disadvantage that if a resource is deleted or if it
moves, say from one web site to another, there may be dangling
links to the resource containing the old URL

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 Uniform Resource Names

• Uniform Resource Names (URNs) are URIs that are used as pure
resource names rather than locators. For example, the URI:
mid:[email protected]

is a URN that identifies the email message containing it in its

‘Message-Id’ field.

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 Name Service

• A name service stores information about a collection of textual

names, in the form of bindings between the names and the
attributes of the entities they denote, such as users, computers,
services and objects.
• The collection is often subdivided into one or more naming
contexts: individual subsets of the bindings that are managed as a
unit.
• The major operation that a name service supports is to resolve a
name – that is, to look up attributes from a given name.
 General name service requirements

The Global Name Service goals, include:

• To handle an essentially arbitrary number of names and to serve
an arbitrary number of administrative organizations.
• A long lifetime.
• High availability.
• Fault isolation.
• Tolerance of mistrust.
 Name spaces
A name space is the collection of all valid names recognized by a
particular service.

Name spaces require a syntactic definition to separate valid names

from invalid names.

For example, ‘...’ is not acceptable as the DNS name of a computer,

whereas www.cdk99.net is valid.
 Name servers and Navigation

The process of locating naming data from more than one name server
in order to resolve a name is called navigation.

Three navigation models:

• Iterative Navigation
• Multicast Navigation
• Non-recursive and Recursive Server-controlled Navigation.
Iterative Navigation
 Non-recursive Server-controlled Navigation

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 Recursive Server-controlled Navigation

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 The Domain Name System

• The Domain Name System is a name service design whose main

naming database is used across the Internet.
• It was devised principally by Mockapetris and specified in RFC
1034 [Mockapetris 1987] and RFC 1035.
• DNS replaced the original Internet naming scheme, in which all
host names and addresses were held in a single central master
file and downloaded by FTP to all computers that required them.

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 Domain names
The original top-level organizational domains (also called generic
domains) in use across the Internet were:

com – Commercial organizations

edu – Universities and other educational institutions
gov – US governmental agencies
mil – US military organizations
net – Major network support centres
org – Organizations not mentioned above
int – International organizations

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 Domain names
In addition, every country has its own domains:
us – United States
uk – United Kingdom
fr – France
... – ...

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