- From: Mic Bowman <mic@transarc.com>
- Date: Fri, 08 Mar 1996 08:18:10 -0500
- To: uri@bunyip.com
A couple years ago, Transarc built a URL translation facility to define equivalent URLs with a preferred order for access. Our motivation was to make use of the caching/replication facilities of a wide-area file system like AFS/DFS. Given the choice of pulling a page from an http server or the equivalent page from an afs server, I generally prefer the afs server. The translation worked through a series of rules not unlike the rules that some servers have for translating incoming HTTP paths into local file system paths. The rules file looks something like this: pattern: substitution1 [frequency] substitution2 [frequency] ... If the URL matches the pattern, then choose a substitution. The substitution is chosen randomly with a distribution based on the frequency parameter. In addition to enabling dual access to files available through both afs and http, the translation provides a nice way to access transparently proxy servers, ftp mirror archives, and replicated http sites. For more information you might want to check out: http://www.transarc.com/Department/Research/projects/SynFS/translate.html --Mic ----------------------------------------------------------------- Member of Technical Staff, Lead Architect Research Group Transarc Corporation The Gulf Tower, 707 Grant Street Pittsburgh, PA 15219 (412) 338-6752 (412) 338-4404 (FAX) WWW: http://www.transarc.com/~mic/Bio.html -----------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Friday, 8 March 1996 08:18:21 UTC