We had a couple of labs of sparcstations that just went away a couple of times a year because something bad would happen with all of the NFS mounted partitions and they'd have to turn the cluster on one box at a time to prevent thundering herd issues with NFS.

I think they may have been mounting parts of /etc as well. People get the idea that managing accounts for a cluster of boxes should be centralized. It's all fun and games until the network mount disappears.