problem with NFS server/mounting

[Guest honychurch]

Hi, I am currently trying to set up NFS on my home network. I have two machines running Mandriva and a third running Debian. I have tried to set up the NFS on both the second Mandriva box and the Debian server. However both times when I try to mount on the client Mandriva I get the following error message:

 

Mount: failed to probe ports on NFS server <server name>

 

I have tried multiple configurations for the exports file on both servers such as

 

/export/video 192.168.0.4(rw,secure)

 

and

 

/export/video 192.168.*(rw,secure)

 

everything apears to be working correctly the hosts.deny and hosts.allow are both empty

 

the command I try to use to mount was

 

mount <hostname>:/export/video /mnt/nfs/video

 

I have tried many different combinations of settings and there is definatly not a problem with firewalls since the debian server is not running any. I am at a loss at what the problem could be as a yahoo search did not show up any results with the same problems. Can anyone help?

 

Thanks in advance Ian

[Gowator]

I think you probably just need to start portmap on both ...

test with

/etc/init.d/portmap start

 

and try remounting... an

exportfs -ra (inbetween doesn't hurt either. )

[Guest honychurch]

Thank you for your quick reply.

 

I tried your suggestion but still have the same response. It does seem strange that all of my systems have the same problem when no one else seems to have these issues. I must have an option selected somewhere which is preventing it somehow or other. I will keep trying to solve this and if you or anyone else has any other ideas will welcome them. Thanks Ian

[Gowator]

You can try

showmount -a <ip of server>

and see if the mounts show up...

[ianw1974]

Is there any particular reason why you've chosen nfs? I've attempted it on my systems and it was extremely slow. I normally just use SSH and use sftp for transferring files between the systems.

 

Although, I did manage to get it working easily enough. Have you tried this link:

 

http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/

 

this gives a load of information on setup and optimising, etc, if you really want to use nfs than other alternatives.

[Gowator]

Is there any particular reason why you've chosen nfs? I've attempted it on my systems and it was extremely slow. I normally just use SSH and use sftp for transferring files between the systems.

If NFS is slow it must be misconfigured.

It has much less overhead than any other alternative and is the native network filesystem. It also generates a lot less extraneous network traffic as it doesn't mutlicast like CIFS.

 

I have a feeling the problem may be with the default mandriva setup ?

[Guest honychurch]

hi, the reason I want to use nfs is because I want to renderfarm cinelerra and in the how-to I was reading this was the method that they used to share the video files.

 

I tried the showmount -a <ip-address>, a got the following message

 

mount clntudp_create: RPC: Portmapper failure - RPC: unable to recieve

 

now I tried the /etc/init.s/portmapper start again and then showmount but still got the same answer does this mean that the portmapper may not have been installed correctly. Ian

[Gowator]

now I tried the /etc/init.s/portmapper start again and then showmount but still got the same answer does this mean that the portmapper may not have been installed correctly. Ian

Yes probably, you can try and

ps -ef | grep portmap

and check its still running and not just dying.

it needs to be running on client and server as well.

 

I can't remember the Mandriva packages for nfs but there are 2 ...

one is userspace (and sucks) and the other is kernel space

 

you need to make sure you have nfs-common (or maybe called client on mandriva)

 

when you run the exportfs -ra

on the sever it should list all the shares..

[ianw1974]

On mandriva, they called it "nfs-utils-clients", you'll need this installing, and it will probably install portmap at the same time. With 2006 this is installed and active by default, but is worth checking. I have a feeling the netfs service will also need to be running, along with nfs-lock and portmap.

[Guest honychurch]

rpmdrake says that both nfs-utils1.0.7-6mdk and nfs-utils-clients-1.0.7-6mdk are installed, portmap 4.0-24mdk is also installed on the client. I don't have libnfsidmap installed do I need this as well??

 

I currently get this on the client

[honychurch@main ~]$ ps -ef | grep portmap

rpc 2781 1 0 14:21 ? 00:00:00 portmap

500 6792 6122 0 15:25 pts/2 00:00:00 grep portmap

[honychurch@main ~]$

 

this on the server

honyserve1:/home/honychurch# ps -ef|grep portmap

daemon 2421 1 0 Feb27 ? 00:00:00 /sbin/portmap -i 127.0.0.1

root 25906 25896 0 15:07 pts/0 00:00:00 grep portmap

honyserve1:/home/honychurch#

 

honyserve1:/home/honychurch# exportfs -ra

exportfs: /etc/exports [6]: No 'sync' or 'async' option specified for export "192.168.0.4:/export/video".

Assuming default behaviour ('sync').

NOTE: this default has changed from previous versions

exportfs: /etc/exports [7]: No 'sync' or 'async' option specified for export "*.honynet.co.uk:/export".

Assuming default behaviour ('sync').

NOTE: this default has changed from previous versions

honyserve1:/home/honychurch#

 

but still get the same result of:

[[root@main honychurch]# mount honyserve1:/export/video/ /mnt/nfs/video/

mount: failed to probe ports on NFS server honyserve1

[root@main honychurch]#

 

or

[root@main honychurch]# mount honyserve1:/export/video /mnt/nfs/video/

mount: failed to probe ports on NFS server honyserve1

 

 

when I try to mount it on the client

 

does that help at all? everything seems to be running ok and like I say there is no firewall running on the honyserve1 machine. DNS is fine and I tried it with IP addresses as well as host names in any case.

 

Ian

 

 

sorry last mount should have read

 

[root@main honychurch]# mount 192.168.0.10:/export/video /mnt/nfs/video/

mount: failed to probe ports on NFS server 192.168.0.10

 

Ian