Demonstration of Client-Server Technology Using Remote Procedure Calls with anApplication of File Migration for Moving Records Based on Time

摘要

As the computing resources of the world are quickly becoming integrated into avast network of interconnected machines, client/server technology is becoming more prevalent as a method to utilize unused resources and to distribute complex systems. Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) serve as one of the means to implement this technology. This report, combined with those produced by 2Lt Andrea Miller and 2Lt Eric DeLange, provide an overview of both the complexity and the benefits of using RPC in a distributed environment. The report initially investigates the fundamentals of RPC and follows with a discourse of RPC's suitability for implementation as a means for computer-integrated file migration. The report presents an application involving RPC for timed file migration and concludes with a discussion of implementing user-friendly front-ends to hide the complex nature of RPC from the user. This specific application investigates the applicability of RPC to developing a distributed file migration application. The application allows the user to access files that may reside on various hosts by querying a central database for a file's location via RPC. Some of the files, however, are dynamically relocated, based on a timing procedure. This could be very advantageous for global organizations that maintain a core set of organization files that must be accessed at a specific time of day (which, of course varies, depending on the time zone of the requester).