DistOS 2014W Lecture 2

(Not sure who originally volunteered to add this lecture, but they haven't put it up so I'm uploading my incomplete notes. Hopefully somebody will be able to fill it in with more detail.)

We now have a working definition of a Distributed OS, so we look a little closer at the underlying network. The internet (and thus the vast majority of distributed OS work today) occurs over the TCP and IP protocols.

Anil observed that the Dist. OS abstractions which succeed are ones that don't hide the network. For example, the remote procedure call (RPC) style abstractions have generally failed because they try to hide the untrusted nature of the network. The result has been a hodge-podge of firewall software which is primarily for blocking RPC-based protocols like SMB, NFS, etc. REST, on the other hand, has succeeded on the open web because it doesn't "hide the network" in this way.