problems w/ autofs and NIS

I am seeing these errors in my logs upon boot:

May 23 18:52:42 beowulf33 autofs: automount -USR2 succeeded
May 23 18:52:42 beowulf33 autofs: automount -USR2 succeeded
May 23 18:52:43 beowulf33 automount[2708]: shutting down, path = /nfs
May 23 18:52:43 beowulf33 automount[2772]: shutting down, path = /-
May 23 18:52:43 beowulf33 automount[2734]: shutting down, path = /homes
May 23 18:52:43 beowulf33 autofs: automount -USR2 succeeded
May 23 18:52:44 beowulf33 automount[2654]: shutting down, path = /misc
May 23 18:52:44 beowulf33 automount[2681]: shutting down, path =
/beowulf
May 23 18:52:45 beowulf33 nfslock: rpc.statd shutdown failed


autofs is not working upon bootup. i need to manually restart autofs
after the machine comes up in order for it to work. any ideas?

thanks.