[SWLUG] NFS Slow Boot

[Will Mc Donald]

From: "Lee Westlake" <lee_westlake at yahoo.co.uk>
> Hi All,
>  
> I've been running a Fedora box for a couple of months, and have
> experienced absolutely no problems at all.
>  
> However, having simply enabled internet access by specifying a recently
> installed wireless router as the default DNS, NFS services now take
> approx 5-10 minutes to boot.
>  
> As the DNS entry is the only modification I have made to this
> configuration, does anyone have any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong.
>  
> Please note, the internet does not appear to work without the DNS entry
> and both NFS server/client services are required on this box.


Are your NFS mounts in /etc/fstab based on hostname or IP address? 

Check to see if the hosts NFS mounting/being mounted are specified statically in /etc/hosts and that the "hosts" entry in /etc/nsswitch.conf looks something like:

hosts:      files dns $otherstuff

That should shortcut DNS lookups for known hosts and maybe speed up NFS startup. Also, do you have any search order specified in /etc/resolv.conf? If you had something like:

search internal.domain

... then it could conceivably be lookups for $host.internal.domain failing to resolve properly via your ISPs DNS (which I assume is what the router's forwarding to) and taking a while to time out.

Failing that, you could always chkconfig nfs off and then run /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs in /etc.rc.local ? 

Will.