Case Study —— Sun Network File System (NFS)

1. Objective: What are the design objectives of the file system?

• High-level support for the heterogeneity of hardware and operating systems
• The simplicity of fault recover
• Access transparency
• Reasonable performance

2. Security: How is access to the file system controlled?

• NFS relies on the RPC Protocol in the process of file transfer or information transfer. The sun RPC Protocol requires authentication information on each request and compare it with the access permission in the file properties.
• Kerberos has been integrated with sun NFS, which provides a more powerful and comprehensive solution for user authentication and security issues.
• Any security system suitable for sun RPC Protocol can be used with NFS, so NFS can integrate many security systems to ensure the security of NFS.

3. Naming: What resource naming scheme is used? (You should also show how this affects the various transparencies that are possible in a distributed file system.)

Resource naming scheme: location transparency.

Location transparency allows us to access remote files in exactly the same way as local files. This is access transparency.

4. The File Access Model: i.e. Upload/Download v’s Remote Access, etc.

• Remote Access Model: Download only the bits that you need, and send back the bits that you change.
• Cache: Cache can solve the problem of repeatedly accessing the same data in remote access model.

5. Cache Update: Is caching used in the system? What is the update policy used to achieve caching?

Yes.

• Disk Sync
• Periodic Flush
• Write-through cache updates
• Write-on-commit cache updates

6. Consistency: How does the NFS ensure file consistency?

• Close-to-open consistency: When a client program to write and then close the file, the client writes all updates to the server.
• Clients need to poll the server to check whether the cache data they have is up to date.
• Timestamp check: when the last time the file block was modified by the server on the client and the last time the cached data on the server was verified, caching data is valid.

7. Service Type: Is the DFS a stateful or stateless service?

NFS is a stateless file service.

8. Replication: Is replication supported? What mechanism is used?

N/A. Read-only files can be copied to multiple NFS servers, but NFS does not support replication of files with updates.

9. Other relevant information

Fault-tolerant:

• The stateless and idempotent nature of the NFS file access protocol ensures that the failure modes found by customers when accessing remote files are similar to those that occur when accessing local files.
• When the server fails, the services it provides will be suspended until the server restarts. Once the server restarts, the user level client process can continue from the point of service interruption without knowing what’s wrong with the server.