Exploiting the internet inter-ORB protocol interface to provide CORBA with fault tolerance

The Eternal system is a CORBA 2.0-compliant system that provides, in addition to the location transparency and the interoperability inherent in the CORBA standard, support for replicated objects and thus fault tolerance. Eternal exploits the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) interface to "attach" itself transparently to objects operating over a commercial CORBA Object Request Broker (ORB). The Eternal Interceptor captures the IIOP system calls of the objects, and the Eternal Replication Manager maps these system calls onto a reliable totally ordered multicast group communication system. No modification to the internal structure of the ORB is necessary, and fault tolerance is provided in a manner that is transparent to both the application and the ORB. 1 Introduction Distributed systems consist of clusters of computers that are capable of both functioning autonomously and cooperating harmoniously to achieve a particular task. The integration of an object-oriented paradigm with a dist...