A distributed file system in a Unix network environment

The design objective of our distributed file system is to develop a location-transparent network-wide file service within the framework of the AT&T UNIX hardware and software architecture. The file system consists of a set of servers and clients communicating through the AT&T 3BNET facilities. For reliability reasons, the information about network files is fully duplicated among the servers with distributed control. "Two-phase commit" and "Time-stamp ordering" techniques are used for maintaining the file system in a consistent state. A design of the directory server using foreground-background processes is presented, and the experimental measurement of its performance is compared with an alternative technique based on "on-the-fly" maintenance.