Description of problem: I just noticed that if rpcbind isn't started properly on boot then the machine will hang trying to start the nfs service. It might be an administrator error and a quite fatal one, but it shouldn't cause the machine to hang during boot; that makes it very hard to resolve the problem, especially if it is a remote machine. (Trying to reproduce it it seems like it might time out after something like 5 minutes. But that is too long, IMHO, especially when no critical nfs mounts has been defined.) In worst case I would expect it to fail with an error after at most 30 seconds. [root@localhost ~]# service rpcbind status rpcbind is stopped [root@localhost ~]# service nfs start Starting NFS services: [ OK ] Starting NFS quotas: Cannot register service: RPC: Unable to receive; errno = Connection refused rpc.rquotad: unable to register (RQUOTAPROG, RQUOTAVERS, udp). [FAILED] Starting NFS daemon: [hanging] Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): nfs-utils-1.2.0-6.fc11.i586
The problem is during this hang, the daemon is trying to connect to rpcbind making the assumption rpcbind is on its way back. This is by design and a design that common through out all of the NFS/RPC code. Plus timeouts are funny things... at one place they are too long and others they are not long enough... So it not clear what can be done to satisfy both camps...
For me with my luser-on-a-workstation-and-occasional-nfs-user-hat on I think it would be fine if /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs acknowledged its dependency on rpcbind and bailed out early if rpcbind hadn't been started - for example by checking /var/run/rpcbind* or /var/lock/subsys/rpcbind. I assume that those who would like to wait for rpcbind also knows how to start it, and that if they fail to start it then they can't expect anything.
hmm... I agree that is a good way to test for rpcbind's existence... but I'm just sure about bailing out because NFS v4 servers don't need rpcbind to exist and there is not a "only-support-v4' mode in the init script... although that might be in the feature...
Hmm. I didn't know that NFS v4 was special in that way. But to summarize my experience/opinion: Just enabling the nfs service without enabling the rpcbind service shouldn't make the machine lock up. Waiting for a long time or forever for rpcbind to show up are valid usecases, but not common ones. Such setups will require special setup anyway, and the administrator will have to specify if it should wait for 5 minutes or forever anyway. How about making the timeout configurable in /etc/sysconfig/nfs and defaulting to 5 seconds?
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