Change replica/updatedb (the heart of replica/scan) to notice remote file system errors, like the network going down, and bail out. Previously, if one machine (say ethel) was doing a scan of /n/sources/plan9 and then the network connection between them was lost, ethel's walk of /n/sources/plan9 would not visit whatever files it didn't get to and would think they were deleted. Now it will notice the network failure and stop.