Work: Symbolic links,nsf mounting and enough rope to touch the ground

Today I was suppose to give a presentation on XCP on the IXP. I was hoping to actually have XCP packets flowing through the IXP processor but I was having this little problem with the drivers for the gigabit controllers. Montavista's 3.1 release shipped the drivers for the development board compiled for a different platform. bad bad bad. Professor Papadopoulos has a friend at CMU that had the previous 3.0 release with the drivers compiled correctly. So I had already booted the development board and nfs mounted the file system to the IXP2400 with the incorrect drivers in the path before I remembered that the correct drivers were over on this other path. Now for you non-computer people out there I'm going to take five minutes to explain symbolic links. Symbolic links are a lot like worm-holes. They connect some point A with some point B in another universe. The difference ends there though and actually it is at the end of the path that really matters, let me give an example.
I tell you on Wednesday to travel down a path(link) called "/erics/short-cut/to/get/there/fast". Now in the morning that "link" will connect you to "/this/has/the/old/drivers". Once I redirect the symbolic link in the afternoon that same link "/erics/short-cut/to/get/there/fast" drops you off over here "/these/are/the/drivers/that/work".
Herein lies the problem and solution. In the morning I told the computer process "nsfd" that "/erics/short-cut/to/get/there/fast" goes over to here "/this/has/the/old/drivers". So when I told the IXP that it should follow the "/erics/short-cut/to/get/there/fast" it checked with nsfd(worm-hole traffic cop) and happily went to "/this/has/the/old/drivers". Now in the afternoon I needed the IXP to goto over to the new drivers. So I changed the symbolic link to point over to "/these/are/the/drivers/that/work". When the IXP2400 rebooted it went to load it's file system and followed the symbolic link "/erics/short-cut/to/get/there/fast" to "/these/are/the/drivers/that/work" when the IXP2400 checked with the nfsd(worm-hole traffic cop) the nfsd process said 'NEIN' 'No link for you'........do you see the problem? nsfd thinks that "/erics/short-cut/to/get/there/fast" resolves to "/this/has/the/old/drivers" but the IXP2400 tells nsfd that it wants to go to "/these/are/the/drivers/that/work" and nfsd says NO link for you. I rebooted nsfd and life was happy, more importantly the IXP2400 forwarded packets from port 0 to port 1.