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.
