@demobox : For this and most of your other comments: mostly tried to stick close to the original volume attachment test (for postboot attachment) because I figured I wouldn't know all  the decisions behind the writing of the test. Perfectly happy to make the corresponding changes over the entire class if you think that's a good idea. (Though I do like this particular bit of Java cuteness; it's a pretty clean way of ensuring that we have some value for the server id in our "finally" clause even though we want to treat it as a final variable in the "try").