资料来源 : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

Nightmare File System
     
        Pejorative hackerism for {Sun}'s {Network File System} (NFS).
        In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS
        {cross-mount}ing, 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 {stateless}ness, 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}.
     
        [{Jargon File}]