Network is all properly set up (internet access + able to ping others),
but I am having extremely slow response when I do a :

'mount 192.168.0.101:/drive /mountpoint'

What happens is the console just locks up and I have to kill it. I go and look at the mount point, and it's an empty directory. But then about 10 minutes later, I look at the mount point, and everything is there.

So what is hapening is that the mount command is successful, but only after a delay of several minutes.

When the mount finaly takes, the access to the disk is fine, so I'm not talking about slow response will in-use, just about slow connection response.

Anyone got any ideas?

Is RPC started and not firewalled out on both boxes?

Thanks for geting me to think about RPC david_ross.
It was indeed an RPC problem. After I did the usual :

/sbin/rpc.portmap
/usr/sbin/rpc.mountd
/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd
/usr/sbin/rpc.statd
/usr/sbin/rpc.lockd
/usr/sbin/rpc.rquotad

and mounted an NFS share, it happened instantly, no lag on the mount.

What I forgot is that the above steps are neccessary on clients as well as servers.

Yes, exactly right, thank you so much for this tip! I was really at a loss to discover where the problem was.

I think the simplest change is to just arrange for NFS to run on the client at boot up:

/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 portmap on
/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 nfs on