A.7. Lessons from NFS
We do not need to look far to see the consequences of ignoring the distinction between local and distributed computing at the interface level. NFS®, Sun’s distributed computing file system[14],[15] is an example of a non-distributed application programer interface (API) (open, read, write, close, etc.) re-implemented in a distributed way.
Before NFS and other network file systems, an error status returned from one of these calls indicated something rare: a full disk, or a catastrophe such as a disk crash. Most failures simply crashed the application along with the file system. Further, these errors generally reflected a situation that was either catastrophic for the program receiving the error or one that the user running ...
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