Name Services

Bina Ramamurthy

10/19/24 B.Ramamurthy 1
Introduction
In a distributed system names are used to refer to a
wide variety of resources such as computers,
services, remote objects, and files as well as users.
Names facilitate communication and resource
sharing.
Names are used for identification as well as for
describing attributes.
Naming Service: provides data about named objects
in a distributed systems.
Directory and discovery service: locates objects that
satisfy a given description.
We will discuss services needed to look up
resources from names and description.

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Names, Addresses and
other attributes
Any process that requires access to a
specific resource must posses a name
or identifier for it. Ex: URL
http:://www.cdk3.net/
A name has to be looked up before it
can be used.
A name is said to be resolved when it is
translated into data about the resource
or object.

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Names and Binding
Names are bound to the attributes of
named objects (and not to any specific
implementations.)
The association between a name and an
object is called binding.
Services are written to map between names
and the attributes of objects they refer to.
Example: domain name Domain name
Service (DNS) maps  attributes of the
host computer

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Composed naming domains
used to access a resource from
a URL
URL
http://www.cdk3.net:8888/WebExamples/earth.html

DNS lookup
Resource ID (IP number, port number, pathname)

55.55.55.55 8888 WebExamples/earth.html

Web server
Network address

2:60:8c:2:b0:5a file

Socket

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Composed Domain Name
A URL is composed of names from three naming
domains: IP (IP address), port number (IPC
domain, socket), and file name (file system).
All three have to successfully resolved to get at
the resource.
An IP address must be looked up to obtain the
network address such as an Ethernet address.
Similarly port number and file name have to be
resolved by the file system.
In the last slide an URL is resolved by a DNS into
IP address, and then ARP into Ethernet address.

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Universal Resource (L,I,N and
C)
URL: universal Resource Locator is the principle means of
identifying web resources.
 Advantages: Scalability and efficiency.

 Disadvantages: dangling links on removal of a resource.

URLs are particular type of URI (UR Identifier). Another type

of URI is URN (UR Name).
URNs are intended to solve the dangling link problem and
to provide richer modes of finding resources on the web.
 URN lookup service will provide URN given a URL.

 Of course the owner registers the resource with the

lookup service when it moves.

URC (UR Characteristics) is for looking up a resource that
matches a description of one or more of its attributes; Ex:
…’author=Leslie Lamport’

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Universal Resource Names
Is an abstraction over URLs.
A URN is of the form:
urn:nameSpace:nameSpace-specificName
urn:doi:10.555/music-pop-1234
Refers to publication called music-pop-1234 in the
naming scheme of publisher known as 10.555 in
the Digital Object Identifier (doi) scheme (
www.doi.org).
Another urn example:
urn:dcs.gormenghast.ac.uk:TR2000-56 can be used
to get the latest information about technical report
TR2000-56 registered with the URL lookup service
gormenghast.ac.uk department of CS (dcs)

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Server Types
Connectionless vs. connection-
oriented
Stateless vs. stateful
Concurrent processing vs. iterative
processing Iterative
Iterative
Connectionless Connection-oriented
Concurrent Concurrent
Connectionless Connection-oriented

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Name Service
A name service stores a collection of one or
more naming contexts – sets of bindings
between textual names and attributes for
objects such as users, computers, services
and remote objects. (Definition)
Major operation: resolve a name: to look up
attributes from a given name. (Operational
Requirements)
Other operations required: creating new
binding, deleting bindings, listing bound
names and adding and deleting contexts.

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General Name Service
Requirements
Originally Name Service was simple since it was to
bind names to addresses in a single domain.
Interconnection of networks and increased scale of
distributed systems have produced a much larger
name-mapping problem.
 To handle arbitrary number of names and to

server arbitrary number of administrative

organizations.
 A long lifetime.

 High availability

 Fault isolation

 Tolerance of mistrust

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Design Issues
Main design issues for Name
services are: (Taking DNS as case
study)
Name spaces
Name Resolution
The domain name system

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Name Spaces
A name space is a collection of all valid names
recognized by a particular service.
Name may be bound to an object or unbound.
Name spaces require syntactic definition.
For example “two” is not an unix process name
whereas 2 is, and … is not acceptable as a DNS
computer name.
Name spaces are typically hierarchical.
DNS names are called domain names; examples:
bruno.dcs.qmw.ac.uk (computer) dcs.qmw.ac.uk,
com, purdue.edu (domains).
Not case sensitive: ac.uk is same as AC.UK

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Name Space (contd.)
Aliases: DNS allows aliases in
which one domain name may
stand for another.
A very popular alias is that for a
web server: www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk
stands for copper.dcs.qmw.ac.uk
This has the advantage that the
clients can refer to the web server
by one generic name.
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Combining Name Spaces
DNS provides a global and homogeneous
name space in which a given name refers to
the same entity, no matter which process on
which computer looks up the name.
But some other name services allow distinct
name space and even heterogeneous name
spaces to be embedded in them. Issues:
merging, heterogeneity, and customization.
We will look at heterogeneity in DCE.

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DCE’s Heterogeneous
Namespace
DCE allows heterogeneous namespaces to be embedded
within it. DCE names are called junctions which are similar
to mount points in NFS and Unix.
Example consider:
/…/dcs.qmw.ac.uk/principals/Jean.Dollimore
/…/dcs.qmw.ac.uk denotes a context called a cell.
Next component “principals” is a junction which is a
context containing security principals in which final
component is Jean.Dollimore can be looked up.
Another Example:
/…/dcs.qmw.ac.uk/files/pub/reports/TR2000-99 where files
is the junction point.
Principals and files are the root for the heterogeneous
names space.

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Name Resolution
Resolution is an iterative process whereby a name
is repeatedly presented to the naming contexts.
A naming context either maps name on to a set of
primitive attributes or it maps it on to a further
naming context and a derived name to be
presented to the context.
Example1: /etc/passwd in which ‘etc’ is presented
to context / and ‘paswd is presented to context
/etc.
Example 2: www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk in which the alias
is resolved to another domain name such as
copper.dcs.qmw.ac,uk which is further resolved to
produce IP address.

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Name Servers and
Navigation
Any name service stores a very large database.
Data is partitioned into servers according to its
domain. In DNS most of the entries are local
computers.
Partitioning of the data implies that the local name
server cannot answer all the enquiries without the
help of other name servers. For example, the name
server in the cse.buffalo.edu would not be able to IP
address of a computer in cs.purdue.edu domain
unless it is cached.
Process of locating naming data from among more
than one name server in order to resolve a name is
called navigation. Ex: Iterative Navigation

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 Iterative navigation

NS2

2
Name
1 NS1 servers
Client
3
NS3

A client iteratively contacts name servers NS1–NS3 in order to resolve a name

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 Non-recursive and recursive
server-controlled navigation

NS2 NS2

2 2
4 3
1 1
NS1 NS1
client client
4 3 5
NS3 NS3

Non-recursive Recursive
server-controlled server-controlled

A name server NS1 communicates with other name servers on behalf of a client

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Caching
Client name resolution software
and servers maintain a cache of
previous name resolutions.
Server may use data from its own
cache or other server cache it is
authorized to access.
Caching is key to performance and
fault tolerance.

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The Domain Name System
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a name
service whose principal naming database is used
across the internet.
It was designed by Mockapetris(1987) to replace
the original internet naming scheme which did
not scale well.
Objects named by DNS are primarily computers
for which IP addresses are stored as attributes.
Millions of names are bound by Internet DNS,
lookup are made from around the world. This is
by hierarchical partitioning of name database,
replication and caching.

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Domain Names
Top level organizational domains
are partitioned geographically and
organizationally. edu , uk
DNS Queries : host name
resolution and well known services.

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 Figure 9.4
DNS name servers
Note: Name server names a.root-servers.net
are in italics, and the (root)
corresponding domains are
in parentheses.
Arrows denote name server entries uk
ns1.nic.uk purdue.edu
(uk) yahoo.com
ns.purdue.edu
(purdue.edu)
co.uk
ac.uk ns0.ja.net
(ac.uk)
* .purdue.edu

ic.ac.uk
qmw.ac.uk

dcs.qmw.ac.uk *.dcs.qmw.ac.uk *.ic.ac.uk

*.qmw.ac.uk

alpha.qmw.ac.uk dns0.dcs.qmw.ac.uk dns0-doc.ic.ac.uk

(qmw.ac.uk) (dcs.qmw.ac.uk) (ic.ac.uk)

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