Extended Attributes and Batching

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Extended Attributes and Batching

• Srinivas Bharadwaj
• Sony DSL

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NFS Evolution

• NFS V2 - Small Engg. Workstations
• in LANs - clients and servers similar size
• NFS V3 - Small Private Area Network
• - several clients serviced by few servers
• NFS V4 - WorldWide Area Net

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Goal of Making NFS V4 default for WWW

• Ubiquitous
• Set Top Boxes
• PCs
• Browsers
• PDAs

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Extended Attributes - Altered Notion of
FilesWhat does it take to Access a File?

• Popularity of File Browsers
• The Internet DeskTop
• 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

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Notion of File Access HAS CHANGED

• 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

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What caused this paradigm shift since 1993

• File Browsers
• Explosion in file formats
• Convergence of desktop networks
• Internet and plugins
• Microsofts COM
• New and Multimedia
• Surf and Click Everywhere

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Alternatives

• 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

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Proposal

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

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Proposal

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

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Bulk Handling and Batching

• 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

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