ugh.book

14

NFS

Nightmare File System

The “N” in NFS stands for Not, or Need, or perhaps Nightmare.

—Henry Spencer

In the mid-1980s, Sun Microsystems developed a system for letting com-

puters share files over a network. Called the Network File System—or,

more often, NFS—this system was largely responsible for Sun’s success as

a computer manufacturer. NFS let Sun sell bargain-basement “diskless”

workstations that stored files on larger “file servers,” all made possible

through the magic of Xerox’s^1 Ethernet technology. When disks became

cheap enough, NFS still found favor because it made it easy for users to

share files.

Today the price of mass storage has dropped dramatically, yet NFS still

enjoys popularity: it lets people store their personal files in a single, central

location—the network file server—and access those files from anywhere

on the local network. NFS has evolved an elaborate mythology of its own:

(^1) Bet you didn’t know that Xerox holds the patent on Ethernet, did you?