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Sorcerer's Apprentice Syndrome is a network protocol flaw in the original versions of TFTP. It was named after Goethe's 1797 poem "Der Zauberlehrling" , because the details of its operation closely resemble the disaster that befalls the sorcerer's apprentice: the problem resulted in an ever-growing replication of every packet in the transfer.

The problem occurred because of a known failure mode of the internetwork which, through a mistake on the part of the TFTP protocol designers, was not taken into account when the protocol was designed; the failure mode interacted with several details of the mechanisms of TFTP to produce SAS.

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