The NFS issue that I had was that I was working for a math/stats department, and the profs made heavy use of LaTeX. Disks were tiny, and the fonts they required were huge. So we had fonts centrally available from an ULTRIX NFS server with a "lot" of disk space (for the time). When running xdvi on Linux, it would take minutes to render a page, with each character showing up one by one. I eventually figured out that xdvi was seeking around byte-by-byte in the font files. Since Linux didn't have any NFS caching, each new read for a few bytes ended up as a slow round-trip over 10Mbs ethernet. DEC ULTRIX (and FreeBSD) rendered the page in seconds, due to having working caching for NFS.
I remember various issues with NFS file locking and I always thought the security and permissions were crap.
I remember in my intro operating systems class we learned that you could open a file for read or write and they had a file offset pointer etc. Then I learned that NFS (v1 and v2) were stateless. The joke I heard was that Sun servers were so unstable in the 1980's that the system was stateless so that it could crash and reboot and didn't need to worry about the client's file state.
My college used AFS (Andrew File System) and the DCE Distributed Computing Environment. It was great as a normal user being able to create my own ACL Access Control Lists of other groups of students and give them read access to some files and make directories for class projects and give another student write access to a single directory in my home dir. NFS with groups is so limiting in comparison.
I haven't used LaTeX in a long time but I was always impressed how it could make integral symbols over fractions with summations and everything else look perfect.
