NFS doesn't work

Often NFS in container does not work because of misconfiguration. This article contains known reasons of such problems as well as solutions for those.

Mount hangs

Symptoms

mount command hangs or takes a very long time to complete:

# mount <ip address>:/pub /data
(...hangs here...)

Reasons

• Lockd is not running on the NFS server
• Portmap (older) or rpcbind (newer) is not running on the NFS client
• Networking is broken (e.g. scripts brought up default route but not IP address yet)

Solution

Two options are possible:

• run lockd on the server
• mount with nolock option

Links

• OpenVZ Bug #620

Permission denied after mount

Symptoms

After a successful mount it is not possible to enter the mounted directory.

Reasons and Solution

• Possible the wrong authentification method for NFS is used. Try to add the mount option sec=sys to use the system mount option [1]