SuSE 9.3 system unable to mount NFS directory

[Andrew Kaplan]

Hi there --

One of our servers is running the 64-bit version of the SuSE 9.3 distribution, and it is unable to mount a filesystem exported from one of our servers. Whenever it tries to mount the filesystem, it gets a permission denied error message.

The server in question is a package within a ServiceGuard cluster. The operating system of the host server is HP-UX 11.11. All servers mentioned in this posting are members of an NIS domain. When the ypmake command was run on the NIS server, there were no errors to indicate a problem.

I have confirmed the SuSE server is a member of the appropriate NFS group, and I verified the context of the netgroups file is correct. There are other servers within the same NFS netgroup, and they are able to access the share in question. These other servers run Red Hat Linux, and are on the same subnet as the server with the NFS exports.

I checked the messages log file on the SuSE server, and there were no entries to indicate a problem. The same was done to the syslog.log file on the NFS server, and there were no error messages reported there.

I am skeptical that a difference in subnets would cause this issue, and I am leaning towards a NFS compatibility problem between the SuSE and HP-UX distributions. Has anyone had a similar issue, and can pass along some words of wisdom on this? Thanks.

[Matti_Kurkela]

Most NFS permission problems I've experienced had been related to hostname/IP address lookup. In particular, the server must be able to successfully look up the client's name when it only knows the client's IP address. (gethostbyaddr(3) system call)

The hostname in NFS permissions entries must match _exactly_ the result of the hostname lookup, otherwise NFS access is denied. "server" is not necessarily the same as "server.company.com".

Try running "rpcinfo -p packageIP" and "showmount -e packageIP" from the SuSE host, to verify that basic network connectivity exists.

MK