Constant NFS automount failure (filling up my console log)

[John_in_NYC]

Dear All,

My console log is full (every 30 seconds or so) of the following notice:

Dec 19 21:27:43 drake kernel[0]: nfs server automount -fstab [228]: not responding

It seems like it keeps trying to spawn the NFS daemon. This has been happening since 10.4.7 (when we got the machine and Tiger server). I have come up with squat in the documentation, on Apple’s developer site, or through google.

Environment
10.4.8 server fully up to date
Mac Pro
System on an internal Raid 1 array
Three Mac 10.3.9 desktops and one 10.4.8 laptop
Only AFP file sharing enabled no NFS exports
Running Mail, DNS, Open Directory Master, VPN and Web services on the box
Otherwise a vanilla configuration

Help, Please. Thank you!

Desperate in NYC,

John

[Anonymous]

Lucky for you I just spent half a week troubleshooting this exact issue…Its counter intuitive, but that error means there is a DNS issue. Even though you don’t have NFS enabled, etc. It will make your life loads easier to make this server a DNS server that is the master for your zone. In System Preferences let this server be the only DNS server. It will be able resolve any address via zone forwarding by looking through named.ca for other DNS servers.

[John_in_NYC]

🙂

My thanks to MacTroll and n^x for responding as it put my on the right track.

There was no /etc/fstab file and I removed the secondary DNS servers in System Preferences as recommended. I had set up (for some boneheaded reason) a couple network mounts of some sharepoints. When I disabled those network mounts in workgroup manager, the errors stopped. D’oh!

My thanks again for getting me on the right track. Now I need to educate myself on network mounts.

Cheers,

John

[brett_x]

MacTroll wrote:

cat /etc/fstab

Hi Joel,

What should that show?
My 10.3.8 and 10.3.9 machines have this:
# fs_spec fs_file fs_vfstype fs_mntops
#
# UUID=DF000C7E-AE0C-3B15-B730-DFD2EF15CB91 /export ufs ro
# UUID=FAB060E9-79F7-33FF-BE85-E1D3ABD3EDEA none hfs rw,noauto
# LABEL=This\040Is\040The\040Volume\040Name none msdos ro

My 10.4 machines don’t have a fstab file at all… and they don’t have problems logging in… only my 10.3.9 machines. (10.3.8 works fine with the 3 lines in the fstab file.)

Thanks!

[brett_x]

I found the problem with our automount… it was the MS UAM file in the /Library/Filesystems…. folder. For some reason, it causes network users to not be able to log in. It’s been a long-standing problem that I was forced to resolve finally (due to DST updates, primarily).

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