I'm running various RHL based nfs servers using RHL 6.2 and all the updated packages from redhat-updates (kernel 2.2.16-3). Never encountered any problems so far. But today I wanted to remount one of the nfs server's exports and the client said permission denied. Syslog of server showed something strange: Sep 5 15:55:04 hoth mountd[25417]: authenticated mount request from exodus.towersoft.de:849 for /raid/compaq1/rpms (/raid/compaq1/rpms) Sep 5 15:55:05 hoth mountd[25417]: getfh failed: Operation not permitted /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs restart solved the problem
Let's just hope that the new nfs-utils that we'll start using in the next release will behave better. For now I will close with worksforme, at least until we can get a test case we can reproduce.
I had a similar problem. An up-to-date RHL7.0 NFS client of an up-to-date RHL6.2 NFS server. Same error message. Restarting NFS on server didn't help. "exportfs -r -v" on server printed very odd lines at end: exporting redbook.mimosa.com:/ to kernel redbook.mimosa.com:/: Invalid argument "redbook" is the client's name and is not mentioned explicitly in /etc/exports. I had to empty the file /var/lib/nfs/rmtab on the server (strace is your friend). Further details upon request.
I've had this same problem the last few days. It was fixed by removing all wild card type entries from /etc/exports. I did have at various stages: /dir *(rw) /anotherdir 192.168.1.0/24(rw) both of which I thought were legal (at least the man page seems to say this).