rpcinfo -t NFSSERVER nfs -> RPC: Port mapper failure – Authentication error

I’m been adding some resiliency to the NFS set up at work recently.  Mainly to allow the clients to gracefully handle the server being MIA at boot, and to allow them to lose and reconnect to their mounts without them complaining too much.

I found a script that looks to be the basis of helping me do this, How to fix stale NFS mounts on linux without rebooting, but it was relying on the rpcinfo command to check if NFS was up.  This command was failing for me and it took more than a few minutes to figure it out so I thought I’d document it here.

sudo rpcinfo -t NFSSERVER nfs
rpcinfo: RPC: Port mapper failure – Authentication error
program 100003 is not available

NFS mounts were however working, so I knew something wasn’t quite right.  The solution on Ubuntu 12.04 lies on the NFS server.  You need to allow the client IP address in the /etc/hosts.allow file for rpcbind.  A minimal example is shown below:

rpcbind : 192.168.1.1

Replace the IP address with the UP addresses of the NFS clients.

I hope that helps someone 🙂

Steve