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Remote Procedure Calls and the Client/Server Model

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Book cover Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems

Part of the book series: Texts in Computer Science ((TCS))

Abstract

Up to now we have looked at cloud computing from a fairly high level, and used terms such as “client” and “server” in ways intended to evoke the reader’s intuition into the way that modern computing systems work: our mobile devices, laptops and desktop systems operate fairly autonomously, requesting services from servers that might run in a machine up the hall, or might be situated in a massive cloud-computing data center across the country. Here we focus on client/server computing as a model and look at the issues that arise when a client platform cooperates with a server, potentially replicating state or holding locks.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is common to call the interface to a program its IDL, although IDL actually is a shorthand for Interface Definition Language, which is the name of the language used to write down the description of such an interface when using CORBA. Thus one often reads about the “IDL” of a Web Services application, despite the fact that such applications describe their interfaces as part of the WSDL document.

  2. 2.

    The author describes this means of attacking an NFS system with some trepidation. Yet the security problem outlined here is so well known, and NFS deployments that disable strong security are so common, that only the most naïve hacker would be unaware of the issue. With this in mind, it seems more important to warn the next generation of system architects about the risk, even knowing that some particularly uninformed hackers could learn of this security hole from this textbook!

  3. 3.

    An important special case arises in settings where each transaction can be represented as a single operation, performing a desired task and then committing or aborting and returning a result. Many distributed systems are said to be transactional but, in fact, operate in this much more restrictive manner. However, even if the application perceives a transaction as being initiated with a single operation, the database system itself may execute that transaction as a series of operations. These observations motivate a number of implementation decisions and optimizations, which we discuss in Chap. 20.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Kenneth P. Birman

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Birman, K.P. (2012). Remote Procedure Calls and the Client/Server Model. In: Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems. Texts in Computer Science. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2416-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2416-0_6

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