Hallo,

I have a machine with Suse 8.1 on it that I had to reboot because it was hanging. After rebooting, I noticed that the /home directory of another unix machine that was mounted via NFS was no longer available, so I typed "mount -a" (as su of course), and got the following error:

mount: RPC: Port mapper failure -RPC: unable to receive

The /home directory of this machine is still mounted on that other unix machine, so it's only a one way failure. All the files of export and hosts look ok, anyway this doesn't seem as a permission issue to me.

I don't even know where to start looking for the cause of this problem, so any suggestions or thoughts are welcome.

Not sure how you would do this on SuSe, but if I had that problem on Fedora or RHEL I would do this:-Commands for your server will probably be similar if not the same.

It turned out that the portmapper was not activated at the old unix machine I was trying to mount. Doing /usr/sbin/portmap and /usr/sbin/mountd solved this problem, and a few others in one go. So thanks a lot!