Hello all,

I am trying to connect to a nfs server on my local network ( the server is a fedora 12 box ) using slackware 13.1 but I am having some problems.
First of all I am sure that the server is configured ok and my desktop can ping the server but when I try :

mount -t nfs 10.0.0.1:/home/usr/file /home/usr/tmp
I get the following error : mount.nfs: No route to host

And when I try to rpcinfo -p 10.0.0.1 I get the error :
rpcinfo: can't contact portmapper: RPC: Remote system error - No route to host

I researched online and some said that if im having problems like that I should configure iptables, but Im new to slackware and I dont know how to resolve the problem.

Thank you very much

Check that on your Slackware machine /etc/rc.d/rc.rpc is executable. That starts portmapper on the client side.


I just want to double check that 10.0.0.1 is the IP address of your NFS server.

Please post the output of iptables -L -n from the Slackware machine. You'll also might want to read this on locking down some of the ports on the server side. If you've got a firewall on the Fedora box, you'll need to keep NFS ports constant.

This is the output of the command : iptables -L -n

Chain INPUT (policy DROP)
target prot opt source destination
ACCEPT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state RELATED,ESTABLISHED
ACCEPT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0
TRUSTED all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW

Chain FORWARD (policy DROP)
target prot opt source destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination
DROP icmp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state INVALID

Chain TRUSTED (1 references)
target prot opt source destination
DROP all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0

Is that from Slackware or the Fedora machine? If it is from the Slackware machine it might work since it would be initiating the connections and anything coming back is likely to be RELATED/ESTABLISHED. If it is on the Fedora server, it looks to me like the TRUSTED chain will drop all incoming NEW connections, in which case you're never going to establish a connection. That TRUSTED chain might also screw up the Slackware machine since I'm not entirely sure that once the NFS client initiates the connection, everything coming back is going to be RELATED/ESTABLISHED.

It might be worth dropping the firewall on both machines and see if you can make a connection then.

That output was from the slackware (client) machine.
How to I shut down the slackware firewall ? I tried iptables stop but it didnt work .

When I shut down iptables on fedora ( server ) I got the following error when trying to mount :
mount.nfs: access denied by server while mounting 10.0.0.1:/home/usr/file

Ive set hosts.allow to allow 10.0.0.2 ( client ) to connect . Permissions are ok on the file too.

Thank you

Slackware usually has its firewall in /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall. Otherwise try (as root)

iptables INPUT -F
iptables OUTPUT -F
iptables TRUSTED -F