In his previous company, Valence Research, Bain developed a distributed Web load-balancing software solution that was acquired by Microsoft and is now called Network Load Balancing within the Windows Serveroperatingsystem.
Open source software such as Apache Web server and the Linux serveroperatingsystem have become popular systems to run not only on network servers, but also on server appliances (servers dedicated to single tasks such as e-mail and Web site hosting).
After some investigation, the problem appeared to be in the Linux network file system (NFS) kernel, the piece of the operatingsystem responsible for some basic server functions.