16. The Network File System
The Network File System, commonly known as NFS, enables sharing of filesystems among computers. NFS is almost transparent to users and is “stateless,” meaning that no information is lost when an NFS server crashes. Clients can simply wait until the server returns and then continue as if nothing had happened.
NFS was introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1985. It was originally implemented as a surrogate filesystem for diskless clients, but the protocol proved to be well designed and very useful as a general file-sharing solution. In fact, it’s difficult to remember what life was like before NFS. All full-featured ...
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