NFS filesystems not mounting at boot - can mount manually

[Rick Stevens]

On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 22:06 -0500, Thomas B. Walter wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 27 Nov 2006, Rick Stevens wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 15:38 -0500, Thomas B. Walter wrote:
> >> Good Afternoon,
> >>
> >> I have a lab of Dells running RHEL4u4. All but one NFS file systems are
> >> not mounting automatically at boot. If I manually issue command "mount -a" the
> >> offending file systems mount with no problems.
> >>
> >> Contents of /etc/fstab:
> >> everest:/scratch        /scratch nfs   soft,bg     0  0
> >> yoda:/data/yoda/a         /data/yoda/a         nfs     soft,bg
> >> yoda:/data/yoda/b         /data/yoda/b         nfs     soft,bg
> >>
> >>
> >> Result of df -k command:
> >> [root at cslab2 log]# df -k
> >> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> >> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
> >>                        74730664   6816748  64117744  10% /
> >> /dev/sdb1               101086     12734     83133  14% /boot
> >> none                    516592         0    516592   0% /dev/shm
> >> everest:/scratch      17413280  12970784   4268384  76% /scratch
> >>
> >> Relevent lines from /var/log/messages:
> >> Nov 27 15:08:23 cslab2 network: Bringing up interface eth0:  succeeded
> >> Nov 27 15:08:30 cslab2 mount: mount: backgrounding "everest:/scratch"
> >> Nov 27 15:08:36 cslab2 mount: mount: mount to NFS server 'everest' failed:
> >> Nov 27 15:08:36 cslab2 mount: mount: backgrounding "yoda:/data/yoda/a"
> >> Nov 27 15:08:36 cslab2 mount: mount: backgrounding "yoda:/data/yoda/b"
> >> Nov 27 15:08:36 cslab2 mount: System Error: No route to host(retrying).
> >> Nov 27 15:08:36 cslab2 netfs: Mounting NFS filesystems:  succeeded
> >> Nov 27 15:08:36 cslab2 netfs: Mounting other filesystems:  succeeded
> >> Nov 27 15:08:36 cslab2 kernel: i2c /dev entries driver
> >>
> >>
> >> Both yoda and everest have entries in /etc/hosts.
> >>
> >> I see System Error: No route to host(retrying) but I don't know why one
> >> NFS file system mounts and not the others.
> >
> > Are both everest and yoda on the same network and/or NIC?  It may be
> > that one network or NIC's route isn't up by the time the "mount -a"
> > occurs, so you get the "no route to host" issue.
> >
> 
> Everest and yoda are on the same subnet. Everest (geo) and yoda (cs) are 
> NIS masters for different NIS domains and the lab machines are part of the 
> "cs" NIS domain but it's everest (NIS=geo) that mounts successfully at 
> boot and yoda (NIS=cs) that doesn't. I'm grasping at straws here including 
> this additional info.

The "no route to host" is the telling issue.  It appears that there is
some oddball routing that's not occurring when the NFS client comes up.
It sees everest right away, but not yoda.  That's what you probably
should investigate first.

However, there's something you can try that may bypass fixing the
routing.  You can try changing the "bg" for yoda-based mounts in
/etc/fstab to "fg" and see if that helps:

	yoda:/data/yoda/a    /data/yoda/a         nfs     soft,fg 0 0
	yoda:/data/yoda/b    /data/yoda/b         nfs     soft,fg 0 0

That will retry the mounts in the foreground if they fail and it may
force the routing to occur in a more timely manner.  This is only an
attempt to bypass whatever weirdness is going on with the routing.  You
really do need to fix the network issue.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-    Overweight:  When you step on your dog's tail...and it dies.    - 
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