Recovery of an 'out-of-sync' file system

[George W. Fleming]

We recently had a most curious thing happened to our Sun server, I was
wondering if anyone has seen this.  I am interested in how to prevent this
from happening again and how to fix it:

Problem:  A NFS client noticed, while performing a 'make', that many of
her files (that reside on the server) had their contents swapped, i.e. the
contents of file A now appears under the filename B, the contents of B
appears under the filename C, etc.

Hardware Configuration:  Server is Sun Sparc 1+, running 4.1.1.  The
client machine is also a Sparc 1+, running 4.1.  The Ethernet is
twisted-pair.

My Guess on What Happened:  A glitch occurred over the network while the
client is attempting to 'sync' with the server, causing the inode/
superblock table to be displaced or messed up.  

Even though contents of all the files should still be on the disk, I was
not able to figure out how to recover them.  I tried Sun's fsck and all it
did was to eliminate some files that it did not like.

Does anyone know why this occured.  How to prevent it. And is there a way
for recovering from such a problem?  Any info/experiences would be
appreciated.

George W. Fleming
gwf at sapphire.bellcore.com