vifs reports “editing error.” Now what?

Starting getting some squirrelly behavior from my external drives (sometimes they would mount read-only, sometimes not). Parallels failed because the drive the filestore was on was suddenly read-only. Then I had a RAID 1 fail because apparently (I had to reboot before I could figure it out completely) one of the drives was read-only and the other wasn’t.

So I turned to trusty vifs to try to solve this except when I type sudo vifs, all I get is a little “vifs: editing error” response. Uh, what do I do now?