22 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
22 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
Nightmare File System
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n. 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 access
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the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it
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to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is
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locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level).
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Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the
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pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to
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discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to
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respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This
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situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is
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frozen worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started
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the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an
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inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature
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(critics, of course, call it a great misfeature ). (ITS partisans are apt to
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cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like
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shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s.) See also
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broadcast storm.
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