NFS - can't contact portmapper

[Adam Noble]

Hi,

Can somebody just confirm my thinking here. We have three servers one is acting as the nfs server and the other 2 are clients. The server and the clients are on different networks and there is a firewall in between. The NFS mounts have recently stopped working on both and I believe this is firewall related. If I run rpcinfo -p to either host it comes back with can't contact portmapper. If I run the same command on a host on the same subnet it works fine. Is this strong enough evidence to start pestering our security team?

Cheers

[Steven Schweda · Accepted solution]

Sounds plausible to me. You might also try
the even simpler test of TELNET to port 111
on the server.

[Dave Olker]

Hi Adam,

Just to be sure, you can try taking a network trace of the "rpcinfo -p" command and see if the trace shows no response from the server. If you see the RPC packet leave the client but never see a reply from the server that would be a good indication there is something stopping the packet from getting to the server, like a firewall.

Regards,

Dave

[Adam Noble]

cheers chaps but sure enough I dound out there had been a rule changed on the firewall. Once it was re-opened all was fine again.