NFS is FUBAR
So, the server that hosts our home folders had a melt down this morning. No big deal. It was back up in record time. Something I noticed though is a couple of servers never quite recovered. It boiled down to NFS would not let the dead connection go in order to re-establish them. Now my real problem was that I could not get in to VNC. VNC's problem was that it could not read the password file in user_a's home folder. The real solution to this is to put the VNC password file somewhere other than the user_a home folder.
I bet if it were on the local drive, I would have been able to login and look at my data. As it was, I was screwed. The best solution to this is to avoid using NFS. I've been told that NFS started as a stateless connection protocol. In other words (and we all need those other words to understand) NFS doesn't make a connection between two computers until a request comes through. A connection is made and when the request is done, the connection is dropped. Well, this sounds like a great idea until you have conflicts that require file locking and crap like that. So, some loose cannon decided to duct tape in some file locking code in NFS. Thank you open source. This fixed his problem, but screwed the rest of us.
I'm not sure what the alternatives are. SMB, I use it at home and it seems to work better than NFS, but it still has serious drawbacks. Besides, the moment Microsoft says "We are going to encrypt all share traffic for security reasons." SMB is out the window. So I've heard anyway.