ok, so I made a little boneheaded move and did the following w/o nfsiod 
running:

   mount magnus:/var/spool/mail /var/mail

I realized that, and got nfsiod started, but now all I get when I try to 
look at /var/mail is "Permission denied". Two examples of this are when I
try to perform the mount again:

  #mount -vat nfs
  mount: statfs /var/mail: Permission denied

and when I try to look at the dir:

  # ls -l /var
  ls: mail: Permission denied
  total 17
  drwxr-xr-x   2 root   wheel      512 Sep 26 15:46 account
  drwxr-xr-x   4 root   wheel      512 Sep 26 15:46 at
  drwxr-xr-x   2 root   wheel     1536 Jan 30 02:29 backups
  drwxrwx---   2 root   wheel      512 Jan  5 18:55 crash
  drwxr-xr-x   3 root   wheel      512 Feb 12 15:00 cron
  drwxr-xr-x   3 root   wheel      512 Feb 12 23:45 db
  drwxrwxr-x   6 games  games      512 Jan 13 08:26 games
  drwxr-xr-x   3 root   wheel     1024 Feb 12 23:00 log
  drwxr-xr-x   2 root   wheel      512 Nov 30 17:32 msgs
  drwxr-xr-x   2 root   wheel      512 Sep 26 15:46 preserve
  drwxr-x---   2 root   operator   512 Sep 26 15:46 quotas
  drwxr-xr-x   2 root   wheel      512 Feb 12 23:46 run
  drwxr-xr-x   2 root   wheel      512 Sep 26 15:46 rwho
  drwxr-xr-x  11 root   wheel      512 Sep 26 15:46 spool
  drwxrwxrwt   3 root   wheel      512 Feb  2 20:05 tmp
  drwxr-xr-x   3 root   wheel      512 Jan 13 08:15 yp
  # 

the system is a 4/300 running -current as of about 3 weeks ago...

thanks

rob



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Off the keyboard, through the CPU, | deker@digex.net 
out the transceiver, down the rj45  | Systems Engineer
line, across the router, through    | 
the Hub, out the gateway.           |  
        Nothing but net."           | 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------