RedHat 9 NFS problem

Hello,

I would greatly appreciate any advice regarding the following problem.

I am running RedHat 9 (all original packages, no updates/patches)
on my workstation. When kernel boots, it prints:

Starting xinetd: OK
Starting NFS services:

and then hangs for a three minutes or so. After that it apparently succeeds
to start NFS server, and continues boot with no problems.

This NFS server is also slow to respond (half-minute delay) when I attempt
to mount directories that it exports on my other machines. However, once
mount has succeeded, all the further access to NFS-mounted directoris
from these machines seems to be allright.

If I try to restart NFS server by executing:

# /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs stop
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs start

the first command completes quickly, but second one hangs for few
minutes, and then suceeds as well.

Amazingly, the same problem happens when I attempt to use telnet or ftp
_clients_ on RH9 workstation to connect to respectively Telnet and FTP
servers on some other machines. Say, if I do:

# telnet <my_other_machine_ip>

on my RH9 workstation, this command hangs for about 30 seconds without
printing anything, and then succeeds (i.e. it presents a login prompt,
I can login to other machine etc.). Same is true for ftp _client_
as well.

However, HTTP access seems to be fine - Firefox can access Internet
websites without any delays. Newsreader (Pan) also has no problems to
connect to news server.

I am pretty sure that this is not a hardware problem - the 'ifconfig'
shows zero errors/collisions.

Everything used to work well util today. I can't really recall what
might have caused this problem. I tried to reboot RH9 workstation
few times, reboot other machines on my network, but this doesn't
seem to help.

I don't think I run firewall on RH9 workstation

service iptables status

shows

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
taget prot opt source destination

I guess this means that firewall is off. I also tried

service iptables stop

which doesn't seem to impact this problem in any way.

I would appreciate any help on this problem.

Thanks in advance and regards,
Andray

nobody wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I would greatly appreciate any advice regarding the following problem.
>
> I am running RedHat 9 (all original packages, no updates/patches)
> on my workstation. When kernel boots, it prints:
>
> Starting xinetd: OK
> Starting NFS services:
>
> and then hangs for a three minutes or so. After that it apparently
> succeeds to start NFS server, and continues boot with no problems.
>

A couple of things I would check right off the bat:

/etc/resolve.conf

Be sure that it contains reliable, valid DNS servers only. If the first
entry is a non-existent or non-functioning server, the name lookup will
have to time out before it tries the next.

/etc/nsswitch.conf

To insure that it is looking for host names using services that you do have
set up.

If you are only using your /etc/hosts file and DNS, then set it up to look
at only files and DNS:

hosts: files dns