What are different components of operating system? – Part 5

This article is continued from “What are different components of operating system? – Part 4”.

10. Networking: 

- Presently, many different types of protocols along with applications and hardware for using them are supported by most of the operating systems. 

- The computers running different operating systems can easily become a part of the network and participate in resource sharing activities such as sharing of printers, scanners and of course files. 

- They may connect to network either through wired connection or a wireless one. 

- Through this component, OS of one computer system can access the resources of another computer system at a remote location. 

- Almost anything can be shared including remote computer’s sound and graphics card. 

- There are network services that allow transparent access to a computer’s resources like SSH.

- Client/ server networking allows a system to connect to a server which offers various services to its clients.

- Numbered access points or ports are used for providing these services beyond the network address of the server. 

- Maximum one running program can be associated to each of the port number which will handle all the requests.

- A user program can then access the local hardware resources by making a request to the kernel of its operating system.

11. Security: 

- The security of a computer system depends on the proper working of the technologies involved in it. 

- A modern OS lets you access many resources both for the internal applications and external devices through the kernel. 

- The operating system must have the capability of deciding which requests are to be allowed and which are to be rejected. 

- There are some systems which decide this on the basis of some requester identity which they further classify as privileged or non–privileged. 

- For establishing the identity there has to be some form of authentication. 

- Mostly a username or ID is quoted along with a password. 

- Some other methods are bio-metric data or magnetic cards. 

- There are cases where no authentication is required for accessing resources. 

- Another concept under security is the authorization. 

- The services which can be accessed by the requester are tied to his/ her account or to group in which he/ she belongs. 

- Some auditing options are also offered by systems having a high security level. 

- With these the requests from various sources can be tracked. 

- Internal security is also essential from the programs that are currently executing. 

- It is maintained by raising interrupts to the kernel of the OS. 

- If direct access is provided to the programs for hardware, then security cannot be maintained.

12. User Interface: 

- For an operating system to be operated by a user, a user interface is required. 

- This interface is termed as the shell and is vital if the operating system is to work according to the user’s instructions. 

- The directory structure is observed by the user interface and then it sends requests for the services wanted by the OS from the input hardware devices. 

- It also sends requests to the operating system demanding for the status messages and prompts to be displayed on output hardware devices. 

- There are two most common forms of the user interface namely the GUI (graphical user interface) and the CLI (command line interface). 

- In the former, the environment is visual and in the latter case the commands have to be typed line by line. 

- Almost, all the modern operating systems come with a graphical user interface.

- In some operating systems such as Mac OS, the GUI is already integrated in to its kernel. 

- There are some operating systems that are modular in nature.