RPC

Question 1

What’s the motivation for RPC?

Answer 1

There are any steps in doing Remote IPC are the same across many applications, writing RPC reduces overhead when writing these applications

Question 2

What are some of the design points for RPC?

Answer 2

1. Binding (global registry, or machine-based registry)
2. Error handling
3. Language spec - can be language specific or agnostic

Question 3

How is Sun RPC designed?

Answer 3

1. binding - machine-based, you must know in advanced. 2. error handling - verbose + error codes
2. language agnostic - XDL

Question 4

How are strings and arrays encoded in Sun RPC?

Answer 4

length + data (str has /0)

Question 5

What are the types of DFS?

Answer 5

• Replicated - all files stored on all machines
• Partitioned - each server stores subset of files
• Both - partition the files and replicate each partition

Can be P2P or client-server

Question 6

Best implementation of remote file system

Answer 6

• allow clients to store blocks of files locally to reduce traffic to/from server
• frequently update server
  (-) makes code more complicated

Question 7

Pros/cons of stateful / stateless file systems

Answer 7

stateless - easy to maintain/write/recover from failure, cannot use caching
stateful - can support locking/cache/sync, higher overheads, harder to recover from failure