AACS5164 Distributed Computer Systems

Tutorial 8 Instructions
1. Read through Chapter 8 when you answer these questions. 2. You must try to answer all the questions before or during your tutorial class. 3. If you have any problems, ask the tutor or discuss with your classmates. 4. Attempting these questions yourself will help you learn the material. IF YOU JUST COPY ANSWERS, YOU WILL NOT LEARN ANYTHING.

Q1. Name and describe the advantages and disadvantages (or complications) associated with supporting location transparency.

Q2. What are the problems of a distributed system that requires each participant to maintain a complete name-to-location mapping table? Used up storage space to store the mapping table on each workstation. Occupied clients/ recipients memory storage. Q3. Name and describe the advantages of utilizing replication in a distributed file system. Advantages Provides failure transparency Act as a backup file. Maintain concurrency of the file. If one system failed, the file still able to obtain through other workstation that available.(can be copy & recover easily by replication.)

Q4.Define and describe the advantages and disadvantages of a distributed file system only supporting immutable files. Advantages Files are protected from being modified. Save network traffic since there are no permission to modify the file Disadvantages Data might outdated(not up-to-date)

AACS5164 Distributed Computer Systems

Q4. Compare and contrast stateful and stateless file servers in terms of the following. A. Support for failure transparency If the file server down(file maintained by server), client cant access to the file. Does not support recovery. If the file server down(file maintained by client), client still able to access to the file. Support recovery.

B. Support for location transparency Client do not need to send all the required information like location, parameters type to the server when request from the server. Can save up network bandwidth. Client needs to send all the information when they want to request a file from the server.

C. Efficiency
Work faster because of pre-created state route. Caused network congestion. Take up more bandwidth while sending the required information to the server on every request.