Extended Attributes and Batching Srinivas Bharadwaj Sony DSL

Extended Attributes and Batching Srinivas Bharadwaj Sony DSL 11/27/2020

NFS Evolution NFS V 2 - Small Engg. Workstations in LANs - clients and servers similar size NFS V 3 - Small Private Area Network - several clients serviced by few servers NFS V 4 - World. Wide Area Net 11/27/2020 1

Goal of Making NFS V 4 default for WWW u u u Ubiquitous Set Top Boxes PCs Browsers PDA’s 2

Extended Attributes - Altered Notion of Files What does it take to Access a File? u u u Popularity of File Browsers The Internet Desk. Top New Notion of movable programs with Java The programs that understand the content of the file do not reside on this desktop The notion of reverse access 3

Notion of File Access HAS CHANGED u u u End User does NOT perform File Access by first starting the program that can understand it The attributes of the file inform you of the nature of its content and what program would understand it The program loaded could ask the user for input and talk to different protocol with another server, for eg. An App. Server 4

What caused this paradigm shift since 1993 u u u u File Browsers Explosion in file formats Convergence of desktop networks Internet and plugins Microsoft’s COM New and Multimedia Surf and Click Everywhere 5

Alternatives u u u Protocol for File Access defined by NFS or Understanding and conventions not covered by Networking Protocols Latter caause too many variant solutions that do not work together 6

Proposal u Accessed Using Attribute u Returns a list of ways to access the file u URLs to Applets u Pathnames to remote executables u mime-type u Icon Representation Attribute u Returns an icon(image) that represents the file 7

Proposal u u u Agree that it is valuable Decide the details on the wire Make it a recommended attribute or even mandatory

Bulk Handling and Batching u u u Complements Compound Requests Allow accesses on multiple files all in one request Used by Proxies to verify their caches Few larger requests vs. several smaller requests Allows search and find