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--- at:tutorial:distribution [2007/07/26 10:30] – Reformulated stijnm
+++ at:tutorial:distribution [2007/07/26 11:03] – Updated stijnm
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 AmbientTalk provides an unique native object, named ''network'',  that responds to two methods that control the network access to an AmbientTalk virtual machine. More specifically, ''network.online()'' and ''network.offline()'' make a virtual machine go online and offline, respectively.
-When the virtual machine goes online, this allows the built-in discovery lookup mechanism to export the local objects and let local objects to find other remote objects. AmbientTalk's discovery support will be further explained in the following section. Taking offline a virtual machine breaks immediately the connections with other virtual machines and thus, all remote reference between them are disconnected. This is a deliberate design choice made to facilitate the simulation of transient disconnections.
+When the virtual machine goes online, the built-in service discovery mechanism is able to broadcast the presence of locally discoverable objects to all virtual machines in the environment, as well as acquaint local objects with discoverable objects on other devices. The precise details of AmbientTalk's discovery support will be further explained in the following section.
+Taking a virtual machine offline on the other hand will immediately sever all connections with other virtual machines and thus, induce a partial failure for all references that transgress the boundaries of a single virtual machine. This is a deliberate design choice made to facilitate the simulation of transient disconnections. Note that such disconnections do not render far references unusable, as we shall explain [[distribution#partial_failure_handling|below]].
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