From: Chuck Reeves (creeves_at_windows.microsoft.com)
Date: Mon Feb 02 2004 - 10:35:32 PST
The paper, "Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed
System", was published in 1984 by a number of employees from Xerox. It
describes a distributed messaging and authentication system called
Grapevine and some of their experiences in managing it. The capacity of
the systems (128 Kbytes memory and 5 Mbytes of disk) they were using was
limited relative to the amount of information they were managing.
Grapevine's primary role was to support email. The designers of the
system were rather ambitious as the system supported 4400 users, 1500
groups on 17 geographically dispersed (Texas, California) servers
connected via low bandwidth networks. The authors describe a number of
problems surrounding the management of information in a distributed
network. These included struggles to delays due to the locality of
information; lack of network availability for inherently synchronous
activity; efficient message distribution; and publication latency. Given
the amount of work invested in this system I was surprised that they
chose to use an unweighted graph as their model of the network. The
support for interactive access to email on servers is still a real
problem in Exchange today. Many of the choices made surrounding
authentication and frequently unreliable links are similar to policy on
Windows today. The remote maintenance model was quite advanced.
Documentation of the design and behavior seems to have been a problem as
I found this quote amusing: "we are slowly forgetting the details of the
implementation and thus becoming less able to predict the consequences
of changes."
Chuck Reeves, creeves_at_microsoft.com
Microsoft | Windows | Directory Services
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