I am reposting this with a changed subject because it might not end up being an NFS specific problem and people not having NFS problems might not have noticed it. It began as an NFS mounting problem and now appears to be caused by hostnames longer than 8 characters.
I am having a very strange problem NFS mounting exports from a SLES 9 machine on some (but not all) of my SUSE Linux 10.1 machines.
This is a summary of the problem, though there are many more details to be had once I figure out what forum is most appropriate for trying to get it solved.
For two out of five 10.1 machines, we cannot NFS mount filesystems exported from SLES 9 machines under a specific setup.
On the SLES 9 NFS server, the filesystem is exported as follows (in /etc/exports and applied with "exportfs -a":
/home bad101host.domain.name(rw,no_root_squash,sync)
When sitting on bad101host, I issue:
mount -t nfs sles9host.domain.name:/home /tmp_mnt
On sles9host I see "rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from bad101host" appear in the /var/log/messages.
But on bad101host, the mount command hangs, never to return until "kill -9" is applied. (Ctrl-c and lesser kills have no effect.)
Here is a fascinating followup to this issue. As I stated above, two of my five 10.1 machines were exhitibing this behavior. I had the opprotunity today to rename one of the two bad hosts and the NFS mount failures went away. Returning it to its original name brought back the NFS mount failures. A coworker had a brainstorm and I have now tested out his suggestion. With a sample size of ten host names I have found that every hostname whose length is 8 or fewer characters works. With lengths of 9 or more they fail. Summary: Length Fail? 5 No 6 No 7 No, three names 8 No 9 Yes, two names 10 Yes, two names (Remember this is only 10.1 trying to mount exports from SLES 9.) I really don't want to have to return to the world of 8 character limits on things. Does anyone have a clue whether there is a patch either for 10.1 or SLES 9 to deal with this? I still can't tell whether this is an openSUSE 10.1 or a SLES 9 issue. Addendum: The SLES 9 machines have nfs-utils-1.0.6-103.23. The Suse 10.1 machines have nfs-utils-1.0.7-36 and nfsidmap-0.12-16, though I don't know if the latter is involved. -- Anthony Vealé National Snow and Ice Data Center E-Mail: veale@nsidc.org Phone: (303)735-5069