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21 lines
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Nightmare File System</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../N.html" title="N"/><link rel="previous" href="night-mode.html" title="night mode"/><link rel="next" href="NIL.html" title="NIL"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">Nightmare File System</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="night-mode.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">N</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="NIL.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="Nightmare-File-System"/><dt xmlns="" id="Nightmare-File-System"><b>Nightmare File System</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">n.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any
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nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when
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one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to
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access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This
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causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is
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that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher
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<a href="../S/spl.html"><i class="glossterm">spl</i></a> level). Then another machine tries to reach
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either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes
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pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both
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to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even
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harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the
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entire network of machines is frozen — worst of all, the user can't
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even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's
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problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its
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statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course,
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call it a great <a href="../M/misfeature.html"><i class="glossterm">misfeature</i></a>). (ITS partisans are apt
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to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working
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NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early
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1970s.) See also <a href="../B/broadcast-storm.html"><i class="glossterm">broadcast storm</i></a>.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="night-mode.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../N.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="NIL.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">night mode </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> NIL</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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