NFS as a “Stateless” Service
The NFS server maintains no transient information about its clients; there is no state other than the file data on disk.
Makes failure recovery simple and efficient.
- no record of open files
- no server-maintained file offsets: read and write requests must explicitly transmit the byte offset for the operation.
- no record of recently processed requests: retransmitted requests may be executed more than once.
Requests are designed to be idempotent whenever possible.
E.g., no append mode for writes, and no exclusive create.