I spent my valuable minutes working on NFS early in the morning today as it stopped to work at once. All were due to login at 7AM and NFS won’t let the system mount their home directories.
I’m used to NIS + NFS + Autofs on floor and the only issue I have been facing with this setup is NFS locking down due to improper logouts or multiple logins from users on different workstations. All this info regarding the filesystem mounts are logged into a file called rmtab by NFS server, which is supposed to get updated dynamically. There is no log entry which confirms this as far as I know. Only thing which you could notice is that, NFS service won’t restart. It locks you down with the message, Starting NFS….. Oh, don’t restart your server, you won’t see much more than this. You will end up waiting for something to happen.
My quick fix for this issue is to remove the rmtab file and restart the service and you’re on run again.
/var/lib/nfs/rmtab contains a list of which filesystems actually are mounted by certain clients at the moment.
Now, I have added a line in rc.sysinit to remove this file during system reboot to ensure that the service won’t get hungup causing more delay in starting my NIS+NFS server. Anyways I don’t want my NFS server to remount the mounts when my server is restarted at least.
Linux NFS Overview, FAQ and HOWTO Documents
blogging this topic here to recall the fixes…
