Status reports

Here is my "project diary" where I made notes of the progress. Since the project is finished this is mostly left here as a curiosity.

Week 45: Searched for, found and printed a lot of reports and articles. Started on web pages.

Week 46: Continued the search for articles and started reading. Started to write litterature study (preliminary disposition etc).

Week 47: Continued the search for and study of articles. Studied AFS history and architecture. Wrote the AFS/Arla part of the litterature study.

Week 48: Continued search for articles. Studied other replicating file systems and wrote notes for litterature study. Studied file systems are (so far): Coda, Deceit, DEcorum, Echo, Ficus, Frangipani, Harp, Huygens and InterMezzo. Not all of these are interesting for this work.

Week 49: Printed out more articles. Studied articles about algorithms and some more about other file systems. Wrote notes for litterature study. Did a huge job on updating the reference list. As a bonus I added nice green buttons to the webpage.

Week 50: Published a preliminary disposition for the litterature study. Edited the preliminary project description and time plan. The time plan and project description are now definitive. Worked with the litterature study. I was ill for a couple of days, and didn't get as much done as I hoped I would.

Week 51: Studied and started writing about optimistic replication and the Ficus and Coda file systems (examples of optimistic replication). Decided that it is Chritsmas and took a few days off.

Week 52: Took a week off to celebrate Christmas and New Year, and to patch my computer for the Y2K problem ;-)

Week 1: Took a few days off, then started studying and writing about pessimistic replication algorithms, mainly voting and dynamic voting. Waded through the 24 pages of references in Chow&Johnson in search for something interesting and found quite a few titles, which I added to the titles page. Not looking forward to searching for all those articles.

Week 2: Sorted through the new references, searched for them and printed the interesting ones of the ones I found, which took about two days. Read what Chow&Johnson have to say about replication (chapter 12), though I had read it before in a course. Added the table at the top of this page. Started looking for AFS administrators interested in participating in the requirements capture and wrote down a few questions to ask them.

Week 3: Read a bit more about Coda in a newly printed article. Read through parts of what I've writen and made some corrections. Read (and wrote a bit) about some pessimistic algorithms, mainly different kinds of quorum protocols.

Week 4: Wrote about more quorum protocols. Continued reading through and editing what I had written so far. Sorted articles. Sent out question forms to some AFS administrators and had some correspondence with the quickest responders.

Week 5: Finished the protocol part of the litterature study (preliminary version) by writing about epidemic update propagation and view consistency in optimistic systems.

Week 6: Studied and wrote about articles with evaluations and comparisons of replication methods. Read and wrote about Harp and Frolic (replicating file systems). Started writing an introduction to file systems.

Week 7: Wrote about more file systems, including Huygens, Echo and Deceit.

Week 8: Wrote about the rest of the file systems, including Bayou, HA-NFS and NFS. Ran spell-checks and started reading through the text.

Week 9: Made a reference list for the litterature study. Continued reading through the text and making corrections and finishing touches. Made a coupple of additions. Now it's starting to look finished, it only needs some TeX-ing and more spell checking.

Week 10: Learned TeX and TeX:ed the files. Ran spell checks. Wrote an abstract. TeX-ed the reference-list. Now I'm geting ready to send a copy to the examiners...

Week 11: Read through and made corrections to the study. Completed some entries in the reference list (detective work!). Printed a copy.

Week 12: Read the printed copy of the litterature study and made more corrections. Worked with the requirements capture (a preliminary version now published).

Week 13: While waiting for comments on the litterature study from the supervisors I started on the option list. Lots of thinking, writing and re-writing...

Week 14: Continued with the brainwork, decided that I need to study Arla and AFS a bit more and tried to find documentation about AFS and Arla. Still waiting for comments from the supervisors.

Week 15: Worked with the option list. Talked to some Arla developers.

Week 16: Worked a bit, Easter holiday on thursday-friday.

Week 17: Still some easter holiday, but did some work, too.

Week 18-22: Forgot to keep the diary updated. Didn't actualy do that much due to other work. Worked a bit with the option list, though. Made some nice illustrations in xfig.

Week 23-24: Summer holiday.

Week 25: Tried to make a new structure for the option list. Re-wrote chapter 1 of the litterature study (introduction to file systems turned inte introduction to distributed file systems).

Week 26: Wrote on the option list and made illustrations for chapter one.

Week 27: Worked with the option list. Asked around a bit for some details that were unclear.

Week 28-30: Worked slowly on the report. Nearly finished, but not quite content with the disposition.

Week 31: Finaly got a better idea for the disposition. Wrote busily and finished the report! I'm now publicing the preliminary version of the report.

September-October: Waited for comments on the report.

November:Held the seminar. Now finishing the report.

December: Had a final meeting with my examiner. The report is now approved, which means that the project is finished!

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