NFS RPC: Port mapper failure - RPC: Unable to receive

[Expattyke]

Good Evening All,

could anyone help with this please? As a background I'm trying to network our three PC's at home here - my machine (host), the wife's, and my son's. All three incidentally are running FC3, although my son's dual boots with Win98. The idea is that all three machines can share an internet connection and the printer attached to my PC. Additionally, all three PC's should be able to access shared files on my PC (family photos, music, etc.), and there are some files on my wife's machine we both need access to.

The internet connection's fine - we have an Origo 8100 modem/router (address 10.0.0.2, netmask 255.0.0.0) which is connected to a Netgear 104 hub, which the three PC's are connected to - all three PC's can access the internet without any problem.

I've set all three machines up with an ip address of 10.0.0.x and netmask of 255.0.0.0, and can ping between all three without any apparent problem. However, trying to set up NFS is proving problematic. The folders I want to share are /files from my PC (host) and /home/shared from my wife's PC (anna) which should only be shared with host. Anna can mount the nfs share from my PC without any problem; on trying showmount and mounting the nfs shares from her PC however I get: -

[root@host ~]# showmount -e anna
mount clntudp_create: RPC: Port mapper failure - RPC: Unable to receive

[root@host ~]# mount anna:/home/shared /files/nfs
mount to NFS server 'anna' failed: server is down.

I've tried service portmap restart and service nfs restart on both machines without any success.

Sorry if some of this seems a bit vague - I'm quite new to this, so any help will be very much appreciated.

[pravatpc]

Dude,
The reason for your problem is the portmap service, :)
So make sure, portmap is up and running,

Try "# service portmap restart" and see it works or not.

If it doesn't workout than check the TCP warappers (/etc/hosts.allow,/etc/hosts.deny), check whether portmap is restricted for some system or something else.

This wil work for sure. If still it doesn't please follow the links below:-
http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/server.html
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/usail/network/nfs/tips.html
http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/troubleshooting.html#SYMPTOM9
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1995/11/msg00387.html



Regards
Pravat

[cybertron]

Hi Baby,
Just some friendly advice since I'm guessing that English is not your first language: this is probably not how you want to greet someone on a web forum. "Hi Baby" would be much more at home on a personals or dating site.:)

As an addition to the advice already given here, you might try running nmap from the client machine to the NFS server machine. It will let you know if the port is open or not and might help narrow down what the problem could be. On my system NFS is running on 2049 (default as far as I know) and I believe it also requires port 111 to be open, although I could be wrong about that. If either of those is closed you could have a firewall issue or maybe the service is not starting correctly.

[justbill]

Hi Expattyke!
I am running FC4 on box1(Goliath) and CentOS 4.2 on box2 (Ulysses) . I added an NFS share on Goliath and to view it from Ulysses, the syntax I used was:
[root@Ulysses bill]# mount -t nfs Goliath.justbillsguitars.com:/home/bill /mnt
[root@Ulysses bill]# mount
[root@Ulysses bill]# ls /mnt

and there were the files! I did get a server is down error, I had to drop my firewall on Goliath to view the files ( i still need to configure my firewall for nfs).
As far as printing is concerned, again with my firewall down I went to http://localhost:631/ and print a test page on the printer locally conected to Goliath from Ulysses. If you have never used this, select "do administrtive task" at the login prompt type "root" for the username, and your root password (for your computer) in the password box. then go to manage printer, and on from there.

Good Luck
Justbill