Web-Based Computing

Web has become ubiquitous

PCs most prevalent devices

More devices becoming networked to allow web access

New category of devices to manage web traffic among similar servers: load balancers

Use of operating systems like Windows 95, client-side, have evolved into Linux and Windows XP, which can be clients and servers

Peer-to-Peer Computing

Another model of distributed system

P2P does not distinguish clients and servers

Instead all nodes are considered peers

May each act as client, server or both

Node must join P2P network

Registers its service with central lookup service on network, or

Broadcast request for service and respond to requests for service via discovery protocol

Examples include Napster and Gnutella

Computing Environments

Traditional computer

Blurring over time

Office environment

PCs connected to a network, terminals attached to mainframe or minicomputers providing batch and timesharing

Now portals allowing networked and remote systems access to same resources

Home networks

Used to be single system, then modems

Now firewalled, networked

Protection and Security

Protection – any mechanism for controlling access of processes or users to resources defined by the OS

Security – defense of the system against internal and external attacks

Huge range, including denial-of-service, worms, viruses, identity theft, theft of service

Systems generally first distinguish among users, to determine who can do what

User identities (user IDs, security IDs) include name and associated number, one per user

User ID then associated with all files, processes of that user to determine access control

Group identifier (group ID) allows set of users to be defined and controls managed, then also associated with each process, file

Privilege escalation allows user to change to effective ID with more rights

I/O Subsystem

One purpose of OS is to hide peculiarities of hardware devices from the user

I/O subsystem responsible for

Memory management of I/O including buffering (storing data temporarily while it is being transferred), caching (storing parts of data in faster storage for performance), spooling (the overlapping of output of one job with input of other jobs)

General device-driver interface

Drivers for specific hardware devices

Mass-Storage Management

Usually disks used to store data that does not fit in main memory or data that must be kept for a “long” period of time.

Proper management is of central importance

Entire speed of computer operation hinges on disk subsystem and its algorithms

OS activities

Free-space management

Storage allocation

Disk scheduling

Some storage need not be fast

Tertiary storage includes optical storage, magnetic tape

Still must be managed

Varies between WORM (write-once, read-many-times) and RW (read-write)