Management of Replicated Files in a UNIX Environment
O. Pearl Brereton · Software Practice and Experience · 1986
This paper describes the design of a scheme to manage updates to a file replicated over a number of UNIX systems. An implementation is described elsewhere. The algorithm prohibits simultaneous updates and maintains a weak consistency between copies. It uses the traditional lock/update/unlock approach but requires only that a majority of the total number of copies of a file be available to process an update.