98-Comp-B10 Distributed Systems — National Examinations, May 2013. 3 hours, closed book, non-programmable calculator only. Candidates were instructed to answer any five of the seven questions, all carrying equal weight and mostly requiring essay-format answers; all seven are answered below as a complete study resource.
Reference texts: Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg & Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (5th ed.) — system models and client-server architecture (ch. 2), interprocess communication and the request-reply protocol (ch. 4–5), operating system support for distributed systems (ch. 7), security (ch. 11), distributed file systems (ch. 12–12.4, AFS/NFS), and time, coordination, replication and fault tolerance (ch. 14–15, 18).
Check — sub-part lettering. Both sub-parts of Questions 1, 3 and 5 are lettered “a.” in the paper's numbering. Each of those three questions is answered below as two genuinely distinct sub-parts, relettered (a) and (b) in the order printed; content and marks weight are unaffected.
