Exercises for Chapter 2:

System models

From Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair

Distributed Systems:
Concepts and Design
Edition 5, © Addison-Wesley 2012
Exercise 2.1

Provide three specific and contrasting examples of the

increasing levels of heterogeneity experienced in
contemporary distributed systems as defined in
Section 2.2. page 39

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
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Exercise 2.1

What problems do you foresee in the direct coupling

between communicating entities that is implicit in
remote invocation approaches? Consequently, what
advantages do you anticipate from a level of
decoupling as offered by space and time uncoupling?
Note: you might want to revisit this answer after
reading Chapters 5 and 6. page 43

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
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Exercise 2.3

Describe and illustrate the client-server architecture of

one or more major Internet applications (for example
the Web, email or netnews).
page 46

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.4

For the applications discussed in Exercise 2.1 state

how the servers cooperate in providing a service.
page 48

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.5

A search engine is a web server that responds to client

requests to search in its stored indexes and
(concurrently) runs several web crawler tasks to build
and update the indexes. What are the requirements for
synchronization between these concurrent activities?

page 46

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.6

The host computers used in peer-to-peer systems are

often simply desktop computers in users’ offices or
homes. What are the implications of this for the
availability and security of any shared data objects that
they hold and to what extent can any weaknesses be
overcome through the use of replication?
pages 47, 48

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
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Exercise 2.7

List the types of local resource that are vulnerable to

an attack by an untrusted program that is downloaded
from a remote site and run in a local computer.

page 50

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.8

Give examples of applications where the use of

mobile code is beneficial.
page 50

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.9

Consider a hypothetical car hire company and sketch

out a three-tier solution to the provision of their
underlying distributed car hire service. Use this to
illustrate the benefits and drawbacks of a three-tier
solution considering issues such as performance,
scalability, dealing with failure and also maintaining the
software over time. page 52

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
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 Exercise 2.10

Provide a concrete example of the dilemma offered by

Saltzer’s end-to-end argument in the context of the
provision of middleware support for distributed
applications (you may want to focus on one aspect of
providing dependable distributed systems, for example
related to fault tolerance or security). page 60

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
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Exercise 2.11

Consider a simple server that carries out client

requests without accessing other servers. Explain why
it is generally not possible to set a limit on the time
taken by such a server to respond to a client request.
What would need to be done to make the server able
to execute requests within a bounded time? Is this a
practical option?
page 49

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.12

For each of the factors that contribute to the time taken

to transmit a message between two processes over a
communication channel, state what measures would
be needed to set a bound on its contribution to the
total time. Why are these measures not provided in
current general-purpose distributed systems?
page 63

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.13

The Network Time Protocol service can be used to

synchronize computer clocks. Explain why, even with
this service, no guaranteed bound is given for the
difference between two clocks.
page 64

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.14

Consider two communication services for use in asynchronous

distributed systems. In service A, messages may be lost,
duplicated or delayed and checksums apply only to headers. In
service B, messages may be lost, delayed or delivered too fast
for the recipient to handle them, but those that are delivered
arrive with the correct contents.
Describe the classes of failure exhibited by each service.
Classify their failures according to their effect on the properties
of validity and integrity. Can service B be described as a reliable
communication service?
page 67 and page 71

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.15

Consider a pair of processes X and Y that use the

communication service B from Exercise 2.14 to
communicate with one another. Suppose that X is a
client and Y a server and that an invocation consists of
a request message from X to Y, followed by Y carrying
out the request, followed by a reply message from Y to
X. Describe the classes of failure that may be exhibited
by an invocation.
page 67

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.16

Suppose that a basic disk read can sometimes read

values that are different from those written. State the
type of failure exhibited by a basic disk read. Suggest
how this failure may be masked in order to produce a
different benign form of failure. Now suggest how to
mask the benign failure.
page 70

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.17

Define the integrity property of reliable communication

and list all the possible threats to integrity from users
and from system components. What measures can be
taken to ensure the integrity property in the face of
each of these sources of threats.
pages 71, 74

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 2.18

Describe possible occurrences of each of the main

types of security threat (threats to processes, threats
to communication channels, denial of service) that
might occur in the Internet.
page 74,75

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012