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/Handling Server Failure with Idempotent Operations
Handling Server Failure with Idempotent Operations
This lesson describes how the idempotency of the NFSv2 operations helps it handle failures.
We'll cover the following...
Server failures
When a client sends a message to the server, it sometimes does not receive a reply. There are many possible reasons for this failure to respond. In some cases, the message may be dropped by the network; networks do lose messages, and thus either the request or the reply could be lost and thus the client would never receive a response.
It is also possible that the server has crashed, and thus is not currently responding to messages. After a bit, the server will be rebooted and start running again, but in the meanwhile, all requests have been lost. In all of these cases, clients are left with a question: what should they do when the server does not reply in a timely manner?
In NFSv2, a client handles all ...