Nfs-Root

Here’s yet another post about my compute cluster. It’s (obviously) running NFS and that works quite well. Up till now, I would always have trouble with portmap hanging on shutdown/reboot. After spending some time thinking about the problem, looking at the init script and googling, I stumbled upon this Ubuntu bug on portmap. As noted in the bug, a pmap_dump would hang indefinitely. After taking another look at our nfs-root configuration (in regard to the first comment on the bug), it turns out it’s exactly that. We didn’t setup lo which seems vital for some things. ...

One problem gone, another one turns up. When rpc.statd (nfs-common) tries to start before portmap, it’s gonna result in failure. Now, the logfile (/var/log/daemon.log) is gonna print a rather cryptic error message: 1 2 Aug 4 15:54:25 xen2 rpc.statd[3419]: Version 1.1.2 Starting Aug 4 15:54:25 xen2 rpc.statd[3419]: unable to register (statd, 1, udp). After fixing the start order (I really hate SUSE/Debian* for not having init-script dependencies – like Gentoo’s baselayout/Roy’s openrc does have), everything is like it should be and I’m able to put the /srv/xen mount into the fstab … ...