I have two machines: A laptop and desktop.

The laptop is running Fedora Core 2 and my desktop Fedora Core 3, more or less straight out of the box. All NFS-related services are enabled on both.

I set up my laptop as an NFS server, as I've a lot of files I want to transfer to my desktop. I'm sharing my /home folder and its all mounted cleanly and set to accept connections from my laptop.

/etc/exports:
/home/mark 192.168.0.2(rw,sync) 192.168.0.1(rw,sync)

/etc/hosts.deny:
ALL:ALL

/etc/hosts.allow:
portmap: 192.168.0.2 , 192.168.0.1
lockd: 192.168.0.2 , 192.168.0.1
rquotad: 192.168.0.2 , 192.168.0.1
mountd: 192.168.0.2 , 192.168.0.1
statd: 192.168.0.2 , 192.168.0.1

It mounts cleanly to /mnt/share. 0.2 is my laptop and 0.1 my desktop. Unless I've missed something, they should mount cleanly.

I've set my desktop to mount the shared folder to /home/mark/laptop in /etc/fstab:

192.168.0.2/mnt/share /home/mark/laptop nfs proto=tcp

I checked my boot-up log...NFS is started without errors and no error is mentioned as far as the above mounting goes, but nothing shows in /laptop. At this point I'm clueless so I turn it over to the good people here.

I believe you need a colon in there.
# device mountpoint fs-type options dump fsckorder
...
master.foo.com:/home /mnt nfs rw 0 0
...

I stole this example from: http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto...ml#REMOTEMOUNT

In general, best to use mount to manually check it before making it persistent with /etc/fstab.

You were right, I was missing one. However, its still failing to mount:

mount to NFS server '192.168.0.2' failed.

How 'bout you try 'rpcinfo -p' and check it against this link:
http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/server.html

What about the firewall?

I've a Softwall hardware firewall runing seperately to these-they plug into the hub and from there the hub plugs into a firewall (old box I've nothing better to do with), so I don't consider than an issue.

I think the machine at fault is my laptop. I was blaming that, couldn't find a thing wrong and tried running rpcinfo on my desktop:

[root@fenster mark]# /usr/sbin/rpcinfo -p
program vers proto port
100000 2 tcp 111 portmapper
100000 2 udp 111 portmapper
100024 1 udp 32768 status
100024 1 tcp 32768 status

According to the sourceforge link I posted, there should be an entry for nfs and one for mountd, in addition to those for portmapper.
Are the daemon's running?
Troubleshooting here:
http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto...eshooting.html