This website gathers material related to the Sun Microsystems Network File System, a project that began in 1983 and remains a fundamental technology for today’s distributed computer systems.
The occasion which prompted this project was the ~40th anniversary of NFS, celebrated in September 2025 at the MSST Conference in Santa Clara, CA.
The core of the collection is design documents, white papers, engineering specifications, conference and journal papers, and standards material. However it also covers marketing materials, trade press, advertising, books, “swag”, and personal ephemera. We’re always looking for new contributions.
We’ve organized the material in four sections:
Unless otherwise noted, everything is downloadable from this site.
A full list of the Internet RFCs related to NFS can be found here.
There is also a site, nfsv4bat.org, which seems to include a variety of materials related to NFS after 1995, especially Connectathons. However, be careful: the site is insecure, load times are insanely slow, and it is unclear whether it’s still being maintained.
This website was created with the help of (alphabetically) Russel Berg, Russ Cox, Steve Kleiman, Bob Lyon, Tom Lyon, Joseph Moran, Brian Pawlowski, David Rosenthal, and Kate Stout. Please send any comments or suggestions to me, Geoff Arnold, via email. Last updated .