/etc/exportfs and NFS exports

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11,465 points

/etc/exportfs and NFS exports

With the upgrade to 10.5, I no longer seem to be able to export filesystems. The "new way" supposedly is to just use /etc/exportfs, and you don't have to use netinfo (which no longer exists). Supposedly it "just works" and indeed /sbin/nfsd is launched.

But nothing happens.

<pre>
% cat /etc/exports
/Users -maproot=nobody other.machine.org

% showmount -e
Exports list on localhost:

[nada]

</pre>

G5 2x2.5 GHZ and a few others, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Nov 17, 2007 9:32 AM

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Answer 1

Bill Scott Author

Level 6

11,465 points

Nov 17, 2007 9:36 AM in response to Bill Scott

I just found that issuing

sudo /sbin/nfsd restart

exports the filesystem.

So then our question becomes, why doesn't it work on boot?

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Answer 2

Nov 20, 2007 12:09 PM in response to Bill Scott

Perhaps there are clues in /var/log/system.log? That's where NFS server errors/warnings get logged.

My guess would be that the host name you are exporting to isn't resolvable when nfsd initially starts. And that asking nfsd to update the exports ("sudo nfsd update") or restart altogether (as you noted) gets things working once that host name is resolvable.

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Answer 3

Bill Scott Author

Level 6

11,465 points

Nov 21, 2007 8:11 PM in response to Mike Mackovitch

Good suggestions, but unfortunately no smoking gun. I should add that the exportfs file is the same I used for 10.4 and earlier and it worked fine, so I think the syntax, and so forth, are all ok. I'm beginning to think it is some sort of disk arbitration issue.

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Answer 4

Dec 28, 2007 8:59 PM in response to Bill Scott

As suggested by Mike, with 10.5, it appears that named hosts in /etc/exports won't work at boot time unless they are defined in /etc/hosts. The problem seems to be that launchd does not support dependencies, as SystemStarter did, and so there is nothing to keep nfsd from running before DNS resolution is available. The question is, how and when is Apple going to fix this?

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