Solved -- Re: Perplexing nfs problem, mount permission denied.

[Michael Torrie]

On Fri, 2005-12-02 at 10:42 -0700, Michael Torrie wrote:
> I have a CentOS4 nfs (v3) server with a mounted disk on /Storage.  I
> have nfs-export this mount-point to various clients.  Up until today it
> worked fine.  Now on any of the client machines when I try to mount the
> share it simply reports 
> 
> mount: server:/Storage failed, reason given by server: Permission
> denied" 
> 
> and the syslog on the nfs server reports
> 
> rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from clientmachine:686
> for /Storage (/Storage)
> 
> There is not mention in the log of any error.  In desperation I even
> tried just exporting to *(rw).  Nothing.  I can't even mount the share
> from the nfs server from localhost.  This one has me completely stumped.
> There is no reason that it should not work.  Is there some daemon that
> I've forgotten about that I should restart?  I've restarted portmapper,
> the nfs daemons, the nfs lock daemon.  I have a vague memory of
> something similar happening to me once before, but I can't remember how
> I fixed it.
> 
> Any ideas would be appreciated.  Oh.  Selinux is off, so that's not the
> problem.  Nor is it a firewall issue.

Here is the solution for posterity

The problem was that the special nfsd file system that mounts
to /proc/fs/nfsd wasn't mounted.  I'm not sure how it gets mounted
(maybe rc.sysinit does it?), but I added an entry to /etc/fstab to be
sure:

none	/proc/fs/nfsd	nfsd	auto,defaults	0 0

Once I did this, everything was completely happy.

One final note.  Apparently the nfsd mount is started when you modprobe
nfsd on RHEL4.  So on a reboot it would have been fine. In the meantime
the fstab entry won't hurt anything.

Michael


> 
> Michael
> 
-- 
Michael Torrie <torriem at chem.byu.edu>