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Portable computers are now common, a fact that raises the possibility that file service clients might move on a regular basis. This new development requires rethinking some features of distributed file system design. The authors argue that existing approaches to file replica management would not cope well with the likely behavior of mobile clients, and they present their solution; a lazy server-based update operation. This operation facilitates fast, scalable, and highly fault tolerant implementations of both read and write operations in the usual case. To cope with the weak semantics of the update operation, the authors propose a new file system service interface that allows applications to opt for UNIX semantics by use of a slower, less fault-tolerant read operation.>
Tait et al. (Tue,) studied this question.