Portmapper madness
23 July 2003 00:00

Ran into a fun little problem on a RedHat box today. For one reason or another, the machine was set to have almost no services start up on boot. So I consoled in via the serial console, got the network up, and then tried to mount up some NFS volumes. The mount command would just hang. So I checked all the network settings, and could ping the NFS server, there were no firewalling rules getting in the way, but the command would just hang. After some head-scratching, it occurred to me that if no services had started up, then likely the portmapper hadn't started, and you kind of need the portmapper running for NFS to work. So I started the portmapper, and voila, it worked. Just a tidbit to file away...