Global Name Service (GNS)

In the examples shown so far, remote services or files are located on known nodes or at known pathnames. For example, the serial port on lab1 is found at /net/lab1/dev/ser1.

GNS allows you to locate services via an arbitrary name wherever the service is located, whether on the local system or on a remote node. For example, if you wanted to locate a modem on the network, you could simply look for the name "modem." This would cause the GNS server to locate the "modem" service, instead of using a static path such as /net/lab1/dev/ser1. The GNS server can be deployed such that it services all or a portion of your Qnet nodes. And you can have redundant GNS servers.