NetBoot is grey in Server Admin

[captainulf]

This problem really annoyed me. Sometimes my NetBoot administration pane in Server Admin would be marked with a grey bubble and I’d be unable to edit my NetBoot settings. DNS and DHCP are on other non-Apple servers so my Xserve only supplies BSDP and NFS. I may or may not have found the “silver bullet” for the “grey bubble”:

The problem seems to related to NFS and a reboot usually fixes it. One of the things that happen during reboot is that the /System/Library/StartupItems/NFS/NFS script is run. Now one the things it does it to wipe the /var/db/mountdtab file.

Upon closer inspection I found that my /var/db/mountdtab file contained an export to a named host. All other hosts were designated by ip adresses. Sure enough the hostname could not be resolved via DNS. So I did the following:

1) delete the line for the offendig host in /var/db/mountdtab (or alternately the entire file. No clue what this does to running clients though)
2) in the Terminal do:

sudo killall -9 nfsd-master; sudo killall -9 nfsd-server;sudo kill -s HUP `cat /var/run/mountd.pid`;

The “kill -9″ing seems a bit excessive but for me it works and the grey bubble is green again.

I hope this helps others

[captainulf]

You’d be right. That’s what one gets for not know exactly how things interrelate. Thanks for the heads up.

I have a question though. I ps’ed for mountd and noticed that several mountd processes seemed to be running

server:/ admin$ ps -ax | grep mountd
209 ?? Ss 0:00.19 mountd
27416 ?? Ss 0:00.03 /usr/sbin/mountd
27474 ?? Ss 0:00.02 /usr/sbin/mountd
27521 ?? Ss 0:00.06 /usr/sbin/mountd
27766 ?? Ss 0:00.04 /usr/sbin/mountd
27847 ?? Ss 0:00.04 /usr/sbin/mountd
27923 ?? Ss 0:00.08 /usr/sbin/mountd
28051 ?? Ss 0:00.06 /usr/sbin/mountd
28151 ?? Ss 0:00.04 /usr/sbin/mountd
2040 p1 S+ 0:00.01 grep mountd

Is that normal?

Also, has the grey bubble been adressed in another thread/article and did I just not see it? I’ve found plenty of equally frustrated posts though. You’d think there’d be an Apple KB article or a fix by now.

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