Flexible and efficient network services

Abstract

Distributed systems that are configured with many small workstations interconnected with a few large servers are becoming more common in the computer science community. In many cases, requesting services across the net requires explicit specification of the name of the large server. Alternatively, designs have been proposed where the it is the responsibility of the operating system to determine which active site should provide the service. In this paper we argue that making site location completely transparent to a user is not a good idea. We present a scheme that allows the user to specify and easily alter the amount of control she exercises over her network services. Once the user has selected or been given default values, these values continue to be used for all future sessions with the same set of services. Hence, all future sessions will appear network transparent without further intervention from the user. We give examples where these concepts are useful both in requesting services resident on a larger host, and storing remote files.