> And of course we were all using NFS, which at the time was completely unable to deal gracefully with a disconnection from the server (no idea whether that has

> And of course we were all using NFS, which at the time was completely unable to deal gracefully with a disconnection from the server (no idea whether that has changed since then). NFS itself has always been able to deal with it, it's just that hard mount and nointr were the default (still are I think), so any connectivity problems meant having to kill -9 the client. Soft mounts weren't common because client software wasn't written to deal with the notion that the filesystem could just go away. NFS4 changed pretty much everything, but the main factor that's changed since olden times is that networks are just more reliable these days.