NFSroot error 13

Dear Group,

I require assistance from an NFS guru - I have googled, but not found a
similar problem, or at least one with a relevent answer.

We currently operate a PC cloning system, in which a host PC is booted
from a floppy containing a Linux kernel with NFS, NFSRoot and kernel
autoconfiguration (bootp) built in. This mounts a remote partition on our
image server, and then runs a script which creates the filesystem and
pulls the files across etc.

The system is currently working fine using our bootp server, however, when
we switch to using DHCP the system stops. The kernel has been
reconfigured to use DHCP in the autoconfiguration, and the lilo.conf has
been changed to show:

image=/vmlinuz-2.4.21
label=Installer
root=/dev/nfsroot
append="nfsroot=193.61.107.141:/usr/local/lics/support/root
ip=::::::dhcp init=/scripts/clone"

The problem seems to occur when trying to mount the NFS partition, when I
see an error message:

"Root NFS: Server returned error 13 while mounting
/route/to/image/partition.
VFS: Unable to mount root fs via NFS, trying floppy."

Error 13 is a permissions error, but Ihave checked all the permissions I
can think of and they all apear OK. File permissions, /etc/exports,
/etc/hosts.allow, /etc/hosts.deny.

When I ran TCPdump on the server to see if this threw any light on the
problem the error message cjhanges to:

"Unable to determine rpc port from server, using defaults"

any ideas?


Gareth Ansell
UNIX Team
Infrastructure
Coventry University