Sesame: The Spice File System

CMU-CS-85-172

Mary R. Thompson, Robert D. Sansom, Michael B. Jones, Richard F. Rashid

December 1985

Sesame is a distributed file system designed and implemented as part of the Spice Project at the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University. It is not just a file storage service, but as well, most of the interrelated services needed to allow protected sharing of data and services in a network of personal and central computers. It deals with issues of user verification both locally and between machines, name lookup services for a variety of typed objects, archiving of files to more stable media as well as the fundamental functions of reading and writing files. Sesame is currently running as an alternative file system in the Spice environment on three central machines and a dozen or so user machines. Archival and retrieval to tertiary storage is still under development, but the rest of the system as described in this document is complete.

This document primarily explains the services that are provided by Sesame. It also presents a general description of the information that is kept in order to give the reader a general idea of how Sesame is implemented.

29 pages

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