next up previous
Next: Implementation Up: HYDRANET: Architecture for IP Previous: IP-Redirectors.

Host Servers.

Replicas of server processes are dynamically installed on or removed from host servers, which are specially equipped hosts that act as servers-of-servers. Before a service replica is installed on a host server, a copy of the origin host's environment is established for the server process to run. We say that a virtual host is installed on the host server. The protocol software on the host server is informed about the new virtual host. When a packet destined to a virtual host is received by the host server, its destination IP address and port number are compared against currently installed virtual hosts and the ports applications are bound to. If a match is found, the data is deposited at the appropriate socket buffer.

Figure 2 shows how the components of HYDRANET interact. We observe from the figure that Host 128.142.222.80 is a host server. The Web service (realized by the httpd daemon) on Host 192.20.225.20 is replicated on the host server, where it is realized by the a_httpd replica daemon. Whenever the process on the host server binds to a TCP or UDP port, the host server and the redirectors are informed, and the redirector tables updated. The HTTP requests from Client C are routed to the origin host. The same requests from Client A are intercepted by the redirector, which happens to be on their route, and which was informed earlier that the nearest Web port for host 192.20.225.20 is located on host server 128.142.222.80. The requests are routed accordingly. Client B's requests for the telnet service are not rerouted by the redirector, but are forwarded to the origin host; the redirector does not have an entry for the telnet port of host 192.20.225.20. We note that neither the clients nor the non-participating servers are affected by this scheme. We will see in Section 5 that even participating servers need not be directly affected.
 

 
Figure 2: Components of HYDRANET


next up previous
Next: Implementation Up: HYDRANET: Architecture for IP Previous: IP-Redirectors.
Riccardo Bettati

Tue Jun 9 00:52:24 CDT 1998