The ability to mount a remote filesystem and read and write to it is something everyone has wanted to do for a long, long time. SMB was an ok solution in the 90s, at least for users with minimal needs. Another dinosaur that we all love to hate is NFS. Despite its synchronization and locking issues, NFS actually works pretty well. But it’s a real headache when it comes to firewalls and certainly is not suitable for use over the open internet. Sysadmins will always tell you “don’t use NFS, it sucks,” but when you ask for a better alternative they just shrug and hastily excuse themselves from the conversation.

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