NFS server not responding still trying ......

[Matti Vainio]

I am receiving following error message while trying to reboot the server.

NFS server (pid509@/net) not responding still trying ......

What does this mean? How can I continue the boot because the system just tries to connect?

Thanks for your answers,

Matti

[Patrick Wallek]

It sounds as if you have some NFS file systems in your /etc/fstab file that are trying to be mounted at boot-up. If you are getting the 'NFS Server not responding......' error message then it sounds as if the server that you are trying to mount those filesystems from is down, or NFS is down on that machine, or NFS is down on your HP machine. Somewhere along the lines there is an NFS problem.

Check your /etc/fstab files for lines that start with something like:

machine_name:/exported/directory /mount/directory NFS .............a bunch of other options

If you have entries like that and don't need them then you can remove them. I would make a backup copy of /etc/fstab first though, just in case they are being used by someone.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Try pressing the control key and the pipe character (or control key and C) to kill the hung startup script.

...JRF...

[Printaporn_1]

Hi,

If you don't mount NFS from NFS server in /etc/fstab problem may come from you cannot resolve own hostname
Did you change IP w/o make change the /etc/hosts ?
you can press break key , you will get login prompt and please try to ping and nslookup the machine hostname.

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

The relevant I have extracted below from the man page for your convenience. Thus, INTR signals such as ctrl-c should work unless you have configured NOINTR.

If you don't like this idea of waiting for the server to startup and constantly get this message flagged on your user's terminal, you may want to configure soft-mounting instead.

============================================
Generally, physical disk I/O errors detected at the server are returned to the client for action. If the server is down or inaccessible, the client receives the message:

NFS: file server not responding: still trying.

The client continues resending the request until it receives an acknowledgement from the server. Therefore, the server can crash or power down, and come back up without any special action required by the client. The client process requesting the I/O will block, but remains sensitive to signals (unless mounted with the nointr option) until the server recovers.

However, if mounted with the soft option, the client process returns an error instead of waiting indefinitely.
============================================

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong
Brainbench MVP for Unix Admin
http://www.brainbench.com

[Esche Markus]

Hi,
in order to proceed the boot-process, you can type 'esc'?.
May you should change the entrie in /etc/fstab that the nfs-mount is soft-mountet, a.e.:
10.0.0.1:/export/path /local/mount nfs soft,retry=5 0 0
that means, if mount fails, nfs deamon will retry 5 times and then it will be skipped

regards

[John Waller]

You have not said what OS version you are running. I had the same error which was causing a problem on 10.20 system and it was due to the automount. Try booting to single user mode mount /usr + /var and have a look at your /etc/rc.config.d/nfsconf file. If it has an entry AUTOMOUNT=1, try changing this to 0 (zero). This is presuming you are not using the automount to mount the NFS file systems. I have also known this problem to happen if the system is not connected to the network so it also may be an idea to check the lights on the back of the server or on your HUB.