The only reason any of these machines have a connection to the Internet is so the VAR can log in with SSH to make fixes and transfer files back and forth.

When a server I haven't seen for 7 years goes down it means the client can't ship product or the lab can't report sample results and nobody can print invoices. They are panicking - the server must be up again immediately and there's simply no time to fiddle with anything new or anything that doesn't work right.

We still have plenty of older systems out there accessible only by modem, but we're trying to get them on Internet access when we can - modem communications is just too unreliable and slow.