Stupid NFS (Debian Squeeze / Ubuntu Precise)

NFS really can be a major PITA. Our office network has been breaking all day.

This seemed to coincide with moving more of our computers to gigabit ethernet (removing the 100mbit CISCO 7960 phones which their network had been daisy-chained through – and seemed to cause intermittent packet loss)

Here are some tips for others unfortunate enough to use it with Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu Precise (12.04 LTS).

1. On Ubuntu NFS clients, you’ll probably want to use proto=tcp and specify a clientaddr=in the mount options (see the below fstab example). This is especially true if you’ve not got entries for the clients within your local DNS server. If you see ‘clientaddr=0.0.0.0’ and DNS resolution for your clients isn’t working, NFS will not work.
2. Don’t try using the nfs-kernel-server from squeeze-backports – as for some reason this causes portmap to be uninstalled, which (in my case) stops NIS from working.
3. Ensure you increase the number of NFS server processes – see /etc/default/nfs-kernel-server (on the server node).