I have been having a strange problem with my Fedora Core 2 distro.

In house, I have a RH9.1 Server that shares two directories, /files and /media, using Samba for the windows clients and NFS for the linux ones. A few days ago, I was running FC2 on my laptop, and the NFS mountings worked just fine. Now, however, I have switched the laptop back to XP and have installed FC2 on my main PC.

I have fstab setup to mount both the remote /files and /media directories, and it mounts /media just fine. However, /files won't mount and exits with "Permission Denied".

If I check the kernel messages, it says that I have:

> localhost kernel: nfs: RPC call returned error 101

The directories are virtually identical - the uid and gid are uniform across both, and nfs on the server seems to be setup fine. I can connect via loopback to the nfs server if i'm ssh'ed into it, and view the files, etc.

I wonder if somehow the server hasn't flushed the old /etc/exports file from memory or something, although I have repeatedly restarted nfs. There was a time a few days ago when I restricted the /files directory to the localhost interface, but that's ancient history now and I have restarted the service probably twenty times since then.

Any thoughts are very welcome!

You asking us to guess too much. You need to post your /etc/exports and /etc/fstab file listings.

Some generic NFS troubleshooting suggestions:

On your server invoke the following to get rid of any cruft from previous changes:
exportfs -ua
exportfs -a

On your client invoke the following to see what is available on your server:
showmount -e <your.nfs.server>

Try mounting manually instead of using your fstab entry to verify that you haven't typoed there.

Thanks for the suggestions. here's the output:

EXPORTS: (server side)
-----------------------
/home/david 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0(rw,sync,no_root_squash)
/mnt/fedora 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0(ro)
/media 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0(rw)
/files 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0(rw) localhost(rw)

FSTAB: (client side)
---------------------------
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
isengard:/home/david /home/david nfs rw,hard,intr 0 0
isengard:/files /files nfs rw,hard,intr 0 0
isengard:/media /media nfs rw,hard,intr 0 0

FSTAB: (server side) (relevant portion)
------------------------------
LABEL=/files /files ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/media /media ext3 defaults 1 2

OUTPUT OF tail /var/log/messages (server side, relavant portions)
-------------------------------
Jul 3 15:44:54 isengard rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.105:759 for /files (/files)
Jul 3 15:44:54 isengard rpc.mountd: getfh failed: Operation not permitted

PERMISSIONS of /files and /media (server side)
---------------------------------
4 drwxrwxrwx 12 root root 4096 Jun 29 13:50 files
4 drwxrwxrwx 10 root root 4096 Jun 15 13:01 media

PERMISSIONS of mount points /files and /media (client side)
----------------------------------
4 drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4096 Jun 30 16:58 files
4 drwxrwxrwx 10 root root 4096 Jun 15 13:01 media

OUTPUT OF exportfs -ua (server side)
----------------------------------------------------
(null output)

OUTPUT OF exportfs -a (server side)
---------------------------------------------------
exportfs: No 'sync' or 'async' option specified for export "192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0:/mnt/fedora".
Assuming default behaviour ('sync').
NOTE: this default has changed from previous versions
exportfs: No 'sync' or 'async' option specified for export "192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0:/media".
Assuming default behaviour ('sync').
NOTE: this default has changed from previous versions
exportfs: No 'sync' or 'async' option specified for export "192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0:/files".
Assuming default behaviour ('sync').
NOTE: this default has changed from previous versions
exportfs: No 'sync' or 'async' option specified for export "localhost:/files".
Assuming default behaviour ('sync').
NOTE: this default has changed from previous versions
192.168.1.105:/files: Invalid argument

OUTPUT OF showmount -e isengard (client side)
--------------------------------------------------
Export list for isengard:
/media 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0
/files/FedoraCore 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0
/home/davidandjustine 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0
/files 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0,localhost.localdomain

Could this error be caused because I am already mounting /files/FedoraCore?

Also, look at the following descrepancies:

1) I am not exporting anything called /files/FedoraCore on the exports list, although I used to.

2) There is no mention of 192.168.1.105:/files in /etc/exports, so why is it showing up as an error message in exportfs -a

Wierd.

Very odd indeed.

Try a:
exportfs -r

Resolution to this Problem: The NFS daemon won't let you attach to a folder when a subfolder is already mounted elsewhere.

As the configuration files noted, I wasn't actively mounting anything in this way, hence my confusion. However, according to the server, I WAS mounted to /files/FedoraCore. The only way I could convice it otherwise was to remove everything in /var/lib/nfs.

Doing so has "broken" RPC, since rmtab is (apparently) not autogenerated if it is missing. However, the mounting now works, and I am happy for the time being, until I get around to installing a new version of NFS and replacing the lost files.