Decentralized naming in distributed computer systems
Timothy Mann · 1987
Designing a global character-string naming facility is an important and difficult problem in distributed systems. Providing global names---names that have the same meaning on any participating machine---is a vital step in welding a collection of individual computers into a single, coherent system. But the nature of large distributed systems makes it difficult to implement global naming with acceptable efficiency, fault tolerance, and security: network communication is costly, system components can fail independently, and parts of the system may belong to many autonomous and mutually-suspicious groups. Existing name service designs do not solve the problem in full; even the best current designs do not have the efficiency or capacity to name every object in a large system---they generally name only hosts or mailboxes, not files. This thesis introduces a new paradigm for name service called decentralized naming. Directories at different levels of the global naming hierarchy are implement...