meaning of nightmare file system
1. Nightmare File System Pejorative hackerism for Suns 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 cant even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFSs 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 Unixs 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] night mode See phase of people. NIH The United States National Institutes of Health. NIHCL A class library for C++ from the US National Institutes of Health NIH. NII National Information Infrastructure NIKL Frame language. ["Recent Developments in NIKL", T. R. Kaczmarek et al, Proc AAAI-86, 1986]. Niklaus Wirth
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