arthur@cs.warwick.ac.uk (John Vaudin) (06/23/91)
I don't know if such a thing exists already, I certainly haven't seen it if it does, but it seems to me that an obvious partial solution to some of the problems people have been talking about would be a disk based file cache. Set aside a partition for a networked volume. This partition holds a cache of most recently accessed files from the network server. When the user opens the network volume they see the contents of the file server's shared folder, or whatever as one would expect. However when the user opens a file or application the *new product* checks to see if that file exists in the local file cache and if so opens it from there. It would also need to check that the version it had was up to date. If it did not exist or the copy was out of date, the *new product* would load it from the server in the usual way, also storing it in the file cache, removing a less recently accessed file if necessary. (I am assuming this is a read only volume which I believe is often the case for shared servers, I'm sure it could be made to work for read/write volumes too , but it is less trivial) This would have the folowing advantages * All system maintenance could happen centrally at file server with changes automatically migrating to machines which are affected. Changing useage patterns for different machines would be reflected automatically in the files stored locally * Most of the time (depending on partition size and usage patterns) only local disk accesses would be required. * The network partition would not be available to the individual user to hack, so hopefully maintaining security As I say it may exist, I haven't seen it. If it is did I think my department would buy it. It doesn't even sound too hard, surely someone could knock this up in a spare evening :-) John. arthur@cs.warwick.ac.uk