BMIS 33243

DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Lesson 8: Supporting Services

 Objectives
To identify which support distributed systems
management
To consider the management of business risk
To examine auditing in distributed systems
To discuss the particular characteristics of help
services and note their value
To examine directory services and user-related
management tools
To consider operating system and language
support for distributed systems management
 Support Service Characteristics
Usability become the main factor of having adequate
supporting services in DS.
The lack of user friendliness in the past for stand-alone
computing systems.
Risk associated with poor usability can be avoided by
ensuring good supporting services.
It can be extensions of the tools and services required
for management operations.
E.g: SS can help user to download new software
libraries for configuration of new software, so user no
attempting to do it with incompatible software
version.
 Support Service Characteristics
DS offer the potential for system user to share common
code as corporate resources.
However, for supplier their product is not open access.
Support service for license control is essential to suppliers
as it is their income from the licensing the product.
Two solutions for this:
- a set of single licenses assigned by user or processing
elements
- Corporate license
Distributed lead to software providers provide access
control software to limit the number of concurrently
operational copies of the software.
 Support Service Characteristics
How SS can help in effective management
by helping the managers with the
organization and planning aspects of their
work including:
Performance measurement and its modeling
System audit and accountability
Risk assessment and management
User administration
Together with the general SS for
management available from OS platforms
and languages used.
 Business Risk Management
Business risk may result in either loss or gain to the
enterprise.
It is the matter for investigation whenever an
enterprise considers whether to procure a new
system or to enhance a new one.
Two component of business risk:
Cost related
Benefit related
All related to procurement or enhancement of DS
 Business Risk Management
Benefit related
Fail to deliver benefits which were projected
Lower projected gains in productivity
Cost related
Whether project will overrun its schedule and budget
3 principal factors: size, structure, degree of technical
complexity
Size
measured in person-hours
Num of intended users
Num of org/locations
Relatively easy to quantify
 Business Risk Management
Structure
Concerns with qualitative aspects
Is the system novel or it is an upgrade using existing and familiar
technology?
How strong user commitment to the project
Degree of flexibility
What degree of flexibility has given to the project team?
The greater the structural change the greater the risk of failure
Risk associated with technical-type and mix of system
hardware and range of interfaces have to be supported
within the systems.
Application software, programming languages, technical
competence of users and their support organizations.
 Business Risk Management
All of these are factors that mgmt must consider
Prepare questionnaires to analyse risk of technical
failure.
Aims to help the user to look objectively at risk of failure
of a project.
Questionnaires can be tailored to the specific
characteristics of a given ent.
DS increases cost related risk because technical
innovation.
After it has become operational, distributed processing
environment provides flexibility to respond to changing
technical needs.
 An audit is an independent examination of an enterprises
records and procedure to verify its state.
Objective is to express opinion on the fairness with which
the records represent the actual position of the company.
Two main kinds of audit procedure:
Evaluates internal controls
Substantive tests validate individual transactions and records
Testing on validity of transaction can be done using audit
trail method
Accountability is the principle that individual should liable
to show how they act as stewards for assets within their
control as part of an audit.
In computer systems, should possible to trace transaction
back to their origins in order to verify that they were
carried out by someone who was properly authorized.

Auditing and Accountability

 Accountability is a principle of internal control
Examples are:
Limited companies are required to keep accounting records
which give a true and fair statement of companys position.
These records are liable to inspection by external auditor.
The UK Data Protection Act requires data to be protected and
accesses accounted for.
For all user actions that are subject to audit, whether they
are comp transactions or request for processing or
information, consequences are:
The identity of the person carrying out the action, together with
date and time of action must be recorded
A system of authorization of user actions must be in operation
backed with the assurance of system integrity
A long term audit trail of the actions must be kept

Auditing and Accountability

 Precautions are needed to avoid loss
Physical protection of the media and keeping back-up
copies, securely stored in different locations
DS add specific practical complexities to
auditing/accountability:
Identification of users-those will be remote from the systems,
audit records are maintained
Selection of audit trail information-integrity of accounting
records
User authentication must be secure for audit trail
Where a remote system allows user to log in under a group
identity, adequate information must be provided for the
purpose of the local systems accounting.
Auditor from one system must be able to recognize and
understand the identities of another systems users

Auditing and Accountability

 Decision on what information to keep and cost in
keeping records is important
It is necessary to negotiate what information will be
recorded as it is done remotely. It must reach
binding agreements about those negotiations with
all parties.
Simple approaches available for preserving
immutability of audit trails to ensure the integrity of
the records.
Accounting records to be held for long periods.
Can use paper, microfilm, magnetic media or optical
recording media to preserve it from destruction and
modification.

Auditing and Accountability

 Paper, microfilm and write once-read many devices
are difficult to modify.
Magnetic media can potentially altered whenever it
is accessed.
Auditability requires data to be retrievable and
retrieval tools be available on all systems where
transactions have been recorded.
Tools themselves need to be tested to demonstrate
their correct operations.
Control must meet the quality requirements for the
audit and this quality also needs to be assured.

Auditing and Accountability

 Auditing and Accountability

Auditing and accountability depend on facilities

such as user identification and authorization,
audit trail and audit tools.
All of these need to have assured integrity and
availability.
They are not necessarily under the direct
control of the organizations which depend
upon them.
 Help Services
Objective of HS is to provide information to users while they
are working.
Form of help information:
General advice
System Overview
Tutorial material
Each help facility has its own requirements.
The list of help facilities are:
Online manual service
A tutorial or training system
Context-sensitive help
User-sensitive help
Expert system help for technical users
User extendable help systems
 Help Services-Form of help info
Online manual service is the simplest form.
The structuring is in tree structures which match the
command structures for which they are providing help.
Drawbacks:
Common command buried deep in the tree, so hard to
find.
Items that related distantly separated in static tree or
documentation.
To gain help in particular topic, enquirer need to know the
command required with all its sub-commands
Bad enough for isolated systems, most bad for
interconnected systems.
 Help Services-Form of help info
Better techniques coming- hypertext styles of
info.organization, multi-level help services, full-text
database of help information.
Online help desk is the online expert systems provide
specialist support for users.
Currently available for expert system
Tutorial and training system important to users of
information technology systems.
It has structured walk-throughs of typical user
activities.
Smart training systems can score user progress and
offer advice.
 Help Services-Users factors
Best help system can response to users when help is
needed.
Its aware of user current purpose and provide help in
terms of what user is trying to do.
In DS user context may difficult to maintain when
interacting is across several systems.
Impossible for help system to detect some semantic
mistake when the syntactic statement is correct.
Different user has different level of experience.
Helpful reminder for expert may not suitable for novice, the
detail help explanation may wasting time for experts.
The really smart help system will respond to users by
judging the level of expertise.
Help Services- Problems of Distribution

Help services provided as support application in commercial

systems .
Some commercial systems provide solution separate from the help
system, by conferencing.
Distribution create problems for designer of help systems, when
trying to provide solution for heterogeneous systems.
A user that running an interactive systems may need access from
help systems from both system and intervening communication
systems.
User may use remote procedure call to gain the help information in
a form recognized and handled by the local help services.
Help service must be able to respond to users expertise level.
Help Services- Problems of Distribution
Local help services must be sensitive to the context of
the local interaction.
It maybe unable to relate to what the user is doing
elsewhere to the context in which the user is operating.
In distributed processing environment, local help service
is support with specific distributed application help
support and the local help service is provided with a
reference to the applications overall context.
Help Services- Problems of Distribution

When operating in world-wide distributed processing

environment, is the language barrier.
It requires for multilingual help facilities.
Not every user can be expert in using every one of the
distributed systems that are accessible.
The level of user expertise cannot be treated as global
parameter.
Help shadowing is a labour intensive service in which a
human operator watches everything done by a user.
 Help Services- Other Factors
Other features of help services which require a deeper
level of appreciation in distributed systems are:
Maintaining help information up to date
Information must be gathered regarding manuals, overview
and tutorial material, system status information, user
experience and user sessions.
Different types of help service facilities required different
timeliness.
It give impact in the decision of procurement and operating
the systems
Support of security policies by help systems
Speed of response
 Help Services- Other Factors
Support of security policies by help systems
Help system must not assist intruder to compromise the security or
integrity of a system
Information must be restricted to users authorized scope.
Managers and operators may have a justifiable need to know
significant details about the details characteristics of systems that
are remote from them.
Speed of response
The minimum speed needed for on-line help facilities must match
the expected response characteristics of other features of
interactive systems
Must be prompt response in fractions of seconds and follow-up in
a time less than the order of five to ten seconds.
Lack of responsiveness can be problems to user.
 Objective is to provide information to users and
application about the location of entities in a
distributed system
Entities can be hardware, software, processes,
services of information.
3 different types of directories are:
White pages
Name-to-address mapping
Yellow pages
A mapping between an application function and a name
Trader services
Brokerage services matching needs of clients to the services
offered by vendors.

Directories and Related Info Services

 Some systems use networked info, service to provide
location-independent operation and configuration data.
It may not easy to provide the information service related
to network applications it need for consistency.
If network scope is local, users and application needs some
way of getting information about external systems
If scope is global, service could easy to use but hard to
maintain consistency.
Information service users need guidance to indicate maybe
information is out dated
Can provide each piece of data with time stamp to show
when it was last updated
Fall back procedure is require to renew information
whenever it is found out dated.

Directories and Related Info Services

 Whenever inconsistency is found, user of service can
request the info system to perform its update procedure.
If a trader were to advise a client use a service which client
find no longer available client would request trader to
provide better data.
Maintaining secure, consistent info service in a distributed
system can be expensive.
Expensive in checking the info consistency and comm.
bandwidth when making queries and updates unless using
broadcast comm.
Point-to-point comm. and switching techniques is no
longer suitable as the systems become larger.
Managers therefore need to determine whether they are
prepared to tolerate for some inconsistency.

Directories and Related Info Services

 Scaling problem cause not efficient to maintain data at one
location for multinational corp.
Results in highly impossible comm demands upon the
single system, risk of total failure and delay in response.
Results in unacceptably long periods during which the info
is inaccessible for all system users.
Time interval between sequences of events is likely to be
less than the time required to propagate the info update
message throughout the DS comm networks.
Management is to require that consistency is maintained
with a given level of time granularity.
Two ways of performing updates: pro-active and reactive.

Directories and Related Info Services

 Pro-active method employs a set of daemons distributed
throughout the system who regularly poll data and check its
consistency.
Daemon is a computer program that runs as a background process,
rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user.
Pro-active method provides a watch-dog which also can detect
changes haven taken place even if, because of local malfunction,
reactive update has not been signaled.
Reactive method relies on the system maintaining the data to send
updates whenever items are changed.
Where data is found to be inconsistent or out of date as a result of
either method, the modification to ensure consistency can take
place.
Reactive method generates only data traffic within the system if
there has been changed.

Directories and Related Info Services

 User-related management tools
User and system administration
Factors that important in administrators support
environment is the ease with new user/resources added or
departed user/equipment removed.
License management as example of SS in dist. processing
environment.
It governs the availability of the software, control the use of
licensed software within the network.
Two types of restrictive license are possible:
Only specified user will be allowed to load the licensed software.
Can use trader function in conjunction with access control ,
control is exercise over the use of any other resources.
If licensed, user is supplied with a copy of the software which is
down-loaded into users working environment.
Always supplying with up to date software version.
 User-related management tools
User and system administration
The other type is:
License limits the number of users who may concurrent access to the
software.
License manager must maintain a count of current number of users.
Software is only down-loaded if this number is less than the number
for which the system is licensed.
If this number has been reached, the user can have the option of
continuing the computing session without the software or else
queuing for a copy to become available.
When user finished using the copy of the software, protocol exchange
with the license manager decrements the usage count when the
down-loaded version of the software has made itself unavailable for
further use.
This technique suffers from scaling problems-because the duration
that users would have to wait for the count to be updated.
Naturally, license can be modified if new users or additional users are
to be accommodate.
 Administrators and operators need an interface through which to
access the management facilities.
This enable them to perform their management function like
obtain info about service they are managing, make decisions and
perform control actions.
Good design interface has to be separated from the managed
components.
Interfaces internal the system then give access to the many
components that are managed by a single administrator or
operator.
Administration is far more convenience and efficient when
operators can manage relevant aspects of systems under their
control from a single console.
The function of human interface is to translate management info.
from the format convenient for internal use into a format that
people can understand, translate commands and requests generate
by a human into the form appropriate to the service being
managed.
User-related management tools
The presentation interface
 Info is filtered and processed to suit the needs of particular
users.
Users need to select info they require and specify how it
should be displayed.
Users should be presented with no more than about 7 pcs of
info at any one time otherwise they become overloaded.
Graphical format is suitable for human, mimic diagrams, pie
charts, histograms.
However needs for authentication for control access to the
management operations.
Security feature like ability to detect when a workstation used
for mgmt purpose or left unattended.
Mgmt should be able to revoke any authorizations so as to
prevent other people from masquerading as
operator/administrator.
User-related management tools
The presentation interface
 Automated tools can help in the speed of operation of DS and the
complexity of info for analysis.
Expert system can aid in decision making.
DBMS can help in database management, make queries.
All need for coherent human interface. It should be based on the
administrator's normal office workstation and OS and
familiar/preferred editor be available.
Theres danger in diluting operators skills.
It may not obtain sufficient practice in coping with problems when
they do arise.
Provide simulation to develop their skills in dealing with unusual
situation because use of live systems may cause disruptions.

User-related management tools

The presentation interface
 OS provides the interlace between software and hardware, support
run-time environment of applications and their users.
It includes disk driver, network protocols handlers and memory
managers.
Most OS support concurrency. In DS all OS modules should provide
mgmt interface, to be managed remotely and secure enough.
OS in Dist.processing environment need to be flexible, support
varied demands of applications.
By having open structure, providing inter-process communication,
process scheduling, least modular and extensible.
inter-process communication should usable by all applications,
capable of interacting over long distance networks.
Critical services-allow short response time, fast from users
perspectives and efficient from systems perspectives.

Support environments
Operating systems
 Flexible scheduling for dynamic nature of the environment, to
support real-time applications.
OS may support various kinds of transparencies. Location
transparency, user unaware the location of files or hiding info
to mgmt operations.
Example: UNIX established with multi-user, multi-tasking that
supports distributed processing activity. Open in terms of
common interfaces, and later with more open structures.
Offer OO features, built-in encapsulation, protection,
integrated storage and language level invocation of
distributed processing.

Support environments
Operating systems
 Describe something in a way that is specific,
unambiguous, can be interpreted by a computer
similar to natural language that human can
understand.
It is used to describe the execution of applications.
Use in DS to create manageable executing entities and
to specify the corresponding managing entities.
Two main considerations in DS that influence the
programming environment.
Need to accommodate heterogeneous languages
Need to accommodate changes to the system.

Support environments
Programming languages
 Example:
HL procedural languages(C,Pascal) are used for real-time control
and monitoring.
OO languages(smalltalk, C++) for man-machine interfaces.
AI languages (Prolog, LISP) for expert and knowledge based
systems.
FORTRAN and COBOL for analysis package and data
manipulation programs.
However, problems of integration, incompatible
communication mechanism and data representation
There is need to integrate components implemented using
various programming languages with approaches like:
Use of configuration languages
Linking mechanism
Shadow components
Interface specification languages

Support environments
Programming languages