From: Reid Wilkes (rlwilkes_at_cs.washington.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 03 2004 - 22:03:13 PST
This paper describes a distributed system called Grapevine which seems, from what is described in the paper to have quickly gone from research project to production system to marketable product in a very short amount of time. The system provides a set of services which seem to be an amalgom of those commonly provided by separate systems today. Most notably, the system provided a network directory service and authentication mechanism resembling current technologies such as kerberos and Microsoft's Active Directory, and a messaging system which looks a whole lot like email (yet is never actually called such). I was quite curious as I read the paper to know more about where the Grapevine system fits in with the development/evolution of email into what we know today. It is almost amusing in some ways to read the description of the surprise the authors had at the popularity of the messaging system - amusing because it's fairly clear the authors were working well before the integ!
ration of email into nearly every aspect of industry and society. It's also interesting to note that there are not a lot of substantial features missing from Grapevine that you can find in a modern mail server like Exchange! One area which is given a large amount of attention in the paper is the reliability and performance of the system. Because pieces of the distributed system were quite geographically dispersed and the links between distant sites quite slow, special design considerations had to be made for performance reasons. And to address reliability, the system was designed in such a way that any given service or function could be provided by a backup machine if the primary were to be unavailable. Some parts of the system, however, were a little lacking. The system needed a large amount of human intervention to continue functioning; even though the designers built in special network portals for for systems experts to remotely connect to and work on a malfunctioning ma!
chine.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Tue Feb 03 2004 - 22:03:17 PST