NAME SERVICES FOR THE SHILPA DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

The design and implementation of name systems have evolved from a simple name mapping server to a general directory lookup system over the last decade. Although the research of name systems is not new, there are many issues and constraints that arc still not resolved in existing systems. By studying a selected set of name systems, we have derived a taxonomy of the design and implementation issues. These include the issues of naming (including assignment, distribution and resolution), database query and design, security, fault tolerance, and network communication. Our study identified DNS and, in particular, its implementation BIND, to be rather mature. We have therefore developed a name system called SHBIND that is based on DNS and BIND for the SHILPA distributed environment. SHBIND has contributed to the Internet DNS technology in the aspects of resource naming and defining, referral name resolution, dynamic update protocol, in-core database structure, yellow-page query processing, and communication mechanisms. It provides not only white-page and yellow-page name services, but also acts as a global binding agent for the ASTRA asynchronous RPC applications.