There will be a period of roughly 3-10 seconds where you will not have access to your home directories. This will cause whatever is trying to access these files to hang for this period.

     This is necessary to replace a defective Ethernet cable that ties the NFS server hosting your /home directories to the switch.  The existing cable sometimes does not make connection if you wiggle it.  This is not a good thing for such a critical server and so needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

     I will plug the new cable into another port in the Ethernet switch, route it to the server, then unplug the existing cable and plug the new one in.  That will probably take a second but since it’s a different port the MAC address on the switch end changes and it will take the computer and the switch a few seconds to figure that out via ARP protocol.