On Sun, 6 Jun 1999 qball@darkphiber.org wrote:

> it tries to mount /usr /home and the swap partion, only to error out with
> this error msg.
> 
> NFS Portmap: RPC: Port mapper failure - RPC: Unable to send

Linux is a horrible and bug-ridden NFS server.  Try using one of your
Solaris boxes instead.  This is definitely a FAQ about NetBSD in general.

I've come to the conclusion that, as a general rule of SAing, ``You should
not use the Linux NFS server to serve NFS.'' Not to NetBSD, not to
Solaris, not to another Linux.  Take your disks off your Linux box and
make it a diskless client instead.  Oh, that's right--you can't. Of your
three UNIXes, only Solaris and NetBSD come with diskless distributions.
With Linux, you are stuck with no swap space and the collection of
sickly undistributable hacks at

  ftp://frannie.Ivy.NET/pub/carton/dropbox/akelly/

oh well.


On Linux, there are two things to try:
  o knfsd or unfsd.  both have serious problems.  maybe you will be happy
    with one of them.  Learn how to switch them, and try the one you're
    not using right now.
  o options to mountd that tell it to only accept v2 mounts.  i believe
    this applies to knfsd only.

On NetBSD, you can try:
  o add '-2' to the options field in your diskless client's fstab

frannie:/usr/export/netbsd-nfsroot/victoria / nfs rw,-r=8192,-w=8192,-2 0 0

  o some older versions of the Linux kernel were incapable of reassembling
    fragmented datagrams.  This is not a joke.  Older unfsd's required:

frannie:/usr/export/netbsd-nfsroot/victoria / nfs rw,-r=1024,-w=1024,-2 0 0

Again, just because one of these tricks makes it boot doesn't mean you've
seen your last problem.  There are other problems, for ex., Linux's ext2fs
has a 32-bit dev_t, and Linux's knfsd won't let you create sockets (no
X11, no syslogd).  _Don't use Linux as an NFS server._

-- 
Miles Nordin / 1-888-857-2723
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700