Nightmare File System

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