A distributed file management system (DFS) with a plurality of nodes and a plurality of files is disclosed. The DFS uses the UNIX operating system tree structure employing inodes (data structures containing the administrative information of each file) to manage the local files and surrogate inodes (s.sub.--...http://www.google.ca/patents/US5175852?utm_source=gb-gplus-sharePatent US5175852 - Distributed file access structure lock
