Bahir Dar Institute of Technology

Faculty of Computing Network and Internet Chair

Introduction of Distributed System

 Content
 Names, Identifiers, and Addresses
 Flat Naming
 Structured Naming
 Attribute-Based Naming
Name, Address and Name Resolution
Name
 Used to denote entities in a Distributed System.
 Examples of entities hosts, printers, disks, files, processes,
users, mailboxes, web pages, graphical windows, messages,
network connections, etc
 To operate on an entity, we need to access it at an access point
 Access Point

 The name of an access point is called an address (such as IP

address and port number as used by the transport layer)
Also referred to as the address of the entity
An entity can have more than one access point (similar to
accessing an individual through different telephone numbers)
An entity may change its access point(e.g., A Mobile Computer
getting a new IP address as it moves)
An address is a special kind of name
It refers to at most one entity
Each entity is referred by at most one address
Even when replicated such as in Web pages
An entity may change an access point, or an access point may be
reassigned to a different entity (like telephone numbers in offices)
 Identifier also other types of names that uniquely identify an
entity.
 Identifier is a name with the following properties
• It refers to at most one entity
• Each entity is referred by at most one identifier
• It always refers to the same entity (never reused)
Types of Naming Systems
 Flat naming: identifier is simply a random bit string.
 It does not contain any information what so ever on how to
locate an access point of its associated entity.
 Structured naming: composed of simple human-readable
names.
 Examples are file system naming and host naming on the
Internet.
 Attribute-based naming: allows an entity to be described
by (attribute, value) pairs.
Flat Naming
 Unstructured name such as identifier does not contain an
information on how to locate an access point of its associated
entity
Flat Naming Systems
 Broadcasting and multicasting
 Forwarding pointers
 Home-based approaches
 Distributed hash tables
 Hierarchical approaches
Broadcasting and multicasting

 Simple but applicable to LAN

 Locating an Entity
-> Broadcast a message containing the identifier of the entity.
 Principle is used in different protocol Ex. ARP
Forwarding pointers

 When an entity moves from A to B, it leaves behind in A a

reference to its new location at B.
 Main advantage of this approach is its simplicity:
 As an entity has been located using a traditional naming
service, a client can look up the current address by following
the chain of forwarding pointers.
 Home-Based Approach
 A popular approach to supporting mobile entities in large-scale
networks is to introduce a home location, which keeps track of the
current location of an entity.
 Is often chosen to be the place where an entity was created.
 Used
-> As a fall-back mechanism for location services based on
forwarding pointers.
-> Another example Is followed is in Mobile IP
The principle of Mobile IP
Structured naming
 Name Spaces: a logical system that assigns unique names or
identifiers to resources in a distributed system.
 A name space is generally organized as a labeled, directed graph
with two types of nodes
 leaf node: represents the named entity and stores information
such as its address or the state of that entity
 directory node: a special entity that has a number of outgoing
edges, each labeled with a name
a general naming graph with a single root node
 Path name: sequence of labels
• Absolute (first node in the path is the root) n0:<home, steen,
mbox>
• Relative (otherwise)
 Each path in a naming graph can be referred to by the sequence
of labels corresponding to the edges of the path and the first
node in the path, such as N:<label1, label2, ..., labeln>, where N
refers to the first node in the path
Name Resolution
 Name Resolution: Name resolution refers to the process of
mapping or translating human-readable names (such as URLs,
domain names) into corresponding network addresses (such as IP
addresses).
Linking and Mounting
Linking: giving another name for the same entity (an alias)
Ex. environment variables in UNIX such as HOME that refer to the
home directory of a user
 Two types of links (or two ways to implement an alias):
Example of Hard link
 Hard link: to allow multiple absolute path names to refer to
the same node in a naming graph
Ex:- In graph, there are two different path names for node n5:
/keys and /home/steen/keys
 Symbolic link: allow a leaf node to contain an absolute path
name

the concept of a symbolic link explained in a naming graph

 when first resolving an absolute path name stored in a node
Ex. /home/steen/keys in node n6),
 Name resolution will return the path name stored in the node
(/keys),
 at which point it can continue with resolving that new path
name.
 Name resolution can also be used to merge different name
spaces in a transparent way
Merging Naming Space
Solution 1: Introduce a naming scheme by which pathnames
of different namespaces are simply concatenated (URLs)
ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/steen
Merging Naming Space cont..
Solution 2: Mounting
 A directory node called a mount point stores the id of (or all the
necessary information for identifying and accessing) a directory
node from a foreign name space called mounting point
 NFS: distributed file system that describes exactly how a client
can access a file stored on a (remote) NFS file server through NFS
URL.
Ex. the subdirectory /remote includes mount points for
foreign name spaces on the client machine
a directory node named /remote/vu is used to store
nfs://flits.cs.vu.nl/home/steen
consider /remote/vu/mbox
This name is resolved by starting at the root directory on the
client’s machine until node /remote/vu, which returns the URL
nfs://flits.cs.vu.nl/home/steen
This leads the client machine to contact flits.cs.vu.nl using the
NFS protocol
Then the file mbox is read in the directory /home/steen
mounting remote name spaces through a specific process protocol
 distributed systems that allow mounting a remote file
system also allow to execute some commands
 example commands to access the file system
cd /remote/vu
 by doing so the user is not supposed to worry about the
details of the actual access; the name space on the local
machine and that on the remote machine look to form a
single name space
Merging Naming Space cont..
 Solution 3: Add a new root node and makes the existing root
nodes its children (Global Name Service (GNS))
Ex. the absolute path name /home/steen has now changed to a
relative path name and corresponds to the absolute path
name /vu/home/steen
 hence the system must expand no:/home/steen to
/vu/home/steen without the awareness of users
 this requires storing a mapping table (with entries such as
n0vu) when a new root node is added
 Merging thousands of name spaces may lead to performance
problems
 m0 oxford
n0 vu

organization of the DEC Global Name

Service
Name Space Implementation

 A name space is implemented by a naming service that allows

users to add, remove and look up names.
 It is implemented by name server(s)
 For a distributed system limited to a LAN, it may be feasible to
implement the name service with a single name server
 large-scale distributed system spread across a large geographical
area, it is necessary to distribute the implementation over many
name servers
Global layer
 Formed by highest level nodes (root node and nodes close to it
or its children)
 Nodes on this layer are characterized by their stability
 They may represent organizations, groups of organizations,
where names are stored in the name space
Administrational layer
 Groups of entities that belong to the same organization or
administrational unit, e.g., departments
 relatively stable
Managerial layer
 Nodes that may change regularly, e.g., nodes representing
hosts of a LAN, shared files such as libraries or binaries
 Nodes are managed not only by system administrators, but
also by end users
an example partitioning of the DNS name space, including
Internet-accessible files, into three layers
 Name space is divided into non overlapping parts, called zones in
DNS
 a zone is a part of the name space that is implemented by a
separate name server
 Some requirements of servers at different layers
 performance (responsiveness to lookups), availability (failure
rate), etc.
 High availability is critical for the global layer, since name
resolution cannot proceed beyond the failing server.
 It is also important at the administrational layer for clients in the
same organization
Name Space Implementation con…
Performance is very important in the lowest layer, since results of
lookups can be cached and used due to the relative stability of the
higher layers
They may be enhanced by client side caching (global and
administrational layers since names do not change often) and
replication;
 they create implementation problems since they may introduce
inconsistency problems
Implementation of Name Resolution
 Recall that name resolution consists of finding the address when
the name is given
 Assume that name servers are not replicated and that no client-
side caches are allowed
 Each client has access to a local name resolver, responsible for
ensuring that the name resolution process is carried out
Two ways of implementing name resolution
 iterative name resolution
 recursive name resolution
Iterative
 a name resolver hands over the complete name to the root
name server
 the root server will resolve the name as far as it can and
return the result to the client; at the minimum it can resolve
the first level and sends the name of the first level name
server to the client
 the client calls the first level name server, then the second, ...,
until it finds the address of the entity
 Ex. assume the path name
root:<nl, vu, cs, ftp, pub, globe, index.txt>is to be resolved or
using a URL notation, this path name would correspond to
ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/globe/index.txt
the principle of iterative name resolution
Recursive
 a name resolver hands over the whole name to the root name
server
 the root server will try to resolve the name and if it can’t, it
requests the first level name server to resolve it and to return
the address
 the first level will do the same thing recursively

the principle of recursive

name resolution
Group Assignment
 Distributed hash tables()
 Hierarchical approaches()
 Attribute-Based Naming()
Thank You!!!