Terminal Services in Heterogeneous distributed systems

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Abstract

This paper examines the requirements and design issues of terminal services in heterogeneous distributed systems and then discusses the architecture of and implementation experience with a prototype terminal services system. To begin, we briefly discuss heterogenous distributed systems and describe why they are important. We then develop requirements for terminal services within these systems. Three general areas of concern are used to categorize the requirements: (1) flexibility, (2) protocol interfaces, and (3) security. With respect to flexibility, we argue that users should be able to logon to a host in a wide variety of situations, not just those that are most common. To allow interaction between systems supporting different protocol families, protocol interfaces that translate terminal services supported by one family into those supported by others are necessary. Finally, we discuss at length the distributed system logon problem and analyze previous work related to its solution. To accommodate heterogeneity while collaterally meeting terminal service requirements, we introduce the notion of administrative domains. They are parts of the distributed system that are homogeneous with respect to a set of appropriate attributes. Gateways provide the necessary mechanisms that allow administrative domains to interact with one another. We describe the interface issues that affect gateway structure related to communication protocols and to logon. From our implementation experience, we discuss performance and architectural issues and summarize our experience by pointing out major contributions of our research.

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