Having trouble mounting a file system...

[Carina Calarco]

Hello all ~
I have never seen this before...
Basic info: HP-UX 10.2 on all machines, file systems that I am trying to mount are exported.

I have a machine called HP26. I've exported a directory called /gen that is mounted on 25 other machines. No problem.
I have an NIS client that has a directory called /training exported but the only machine that will mount it is HP26. The others either fail at boot time or they mount at boot and then go stale. The ones that fail have this message in rc.log:
chp1.photoc.com/training: server not responding : RPC_TIMED_OUT

FAILURE CODE: 1
Mount failed! Possible local filesystem mount.
If local filesystem, then nfs.server will mount it.

When you get the "server not responding" error, you can ping the system. I'm figuring that if we had a bad switch or bad network cables, /gen would be giving me problems also. But it isn't. I tried 3 other machines with the same results. Mount only works if HP26 is the source or destination of a mount. What am I missing? Any help would be greatly appreciated...

Carina

[Rita C Workman]

Your problem may be related to a couple things..nfs server not running; rpcd not running; configuration files need checked.

Take a look at this thread....it goes through these issues:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x20d8f841489fd4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

/rcw

[Carina Calarco]

Hi Rita ~

I took a look at the thread but all the proper daemons are running and the netconf and export files look good. This one is driving me crazy!

[Volker Borowski]

Hello Carina,

the dotted name shows me, that you run DNS ?!?
I suspect a wrong nameserver setup on either the client side of the machines that do not mount the FS, but more on the DNS side, where you might miss the reverse entry for the client machines. Search the forum with "reverse lookup", to get details on this.
Testoption may be to disable DNS-lookup on chp1 for debugging reasons for a while.

Hope this helps
Volker

[Carina Calarco]

Hi ~

We are actually not running DNS. I, unfortunately, inherited a series of unrealized concepts. They had planned to use it a few years ago but never did. The names still exist but DNS isn't running on any of the machines.

I've checked exports, nfsd, rpc.mountd, directory permissions, LV configuration, nfsconf, host files, fstab and everything else I could think of. I'm at a loss.

[Shannon Petry]

Here are a few other thoughts as to your problem. Sorry if I get too simple with explenations.

NFS export requires /etc/exports to contain the directory name as well as controlls for the directory. This can be limited to host access, read only, read-write, etc... If host access is used and a host can not be resolved by ALL mechanisms then the mount will fail.

When we look at ALL mechanisms for host resolutions we have to look at /etc/nsswitch.conf's hosts entry. The default is DNS NIS and files last.
Modify this in SAM to continue if it fails or is not configured, and use the order you are using. I.E
hosts [notfound=continue tryagain=continue] nis [notfound=continue tryagain=continue] dns

Just because you can ping the system does not mean that it's name is resolved properly.

If you are not using DNS, then remove /etc/resolv.conf if it exists. This again will help with name resolution.

Next, both the server and client must be able to resolve each other properly. Perform the same steps on the client and server mentioned above.

Next, there could be a problem with too many mounts on the server. How many nfsd's are starting, and how many biod's are starting on the client?

if you have 26 mounts from one server, I would recommend running 16 nfsd's. 2 for 1 is usually safe, but at the default of 4, you could be getting timeouts trying to establish the connection. If your clients are mounting a bunch of stuff, then they will need more than the default "4" biod's starting as well.

Next we have to look at permissions on the exported directory. A minimum permission of 555 is needed for the client to make the connection.

Hope it helps.
Shannon

[Carina Calarco]

Hi Shannon ~

My /etc/exports file is pretty simple. It just looks like this:

/training

I have no resolv.conf or nsswitch.conf (?). I added the nsswitch.conf but I was still unsuccessful.

Permissions on the exported directory are 777.

The one thing that bothers me the most is that the mount between CHP1 and HP26 is perfect.