Alternatives to NFS

I've been rebooting my main NFS server because I've been adding disk space. This is causing all of my machines to "back up" processes, naturally. I want to just get on with life. I'm going to try "soft,bg,intr,timeo=1" for options in fstab, but I'm looking for other options. Does anyone have a preference for a different filesystem setup? At this point, I'm ready to use samba for all mounting purposes, regardless of the protocol's origins. I just can't stand that after a dozen years of using Unix and its variants, NFS is the one and only thing that consistently causes me to reboot a box. I've heard of AFS and Coda, but I also hear that they're very difficult to set up. Anyone? Grrr, dk