mount.nfs: Failed to resolve server

Solution 1:

I have yet to figure out what the real problem is but the solution is to remove rotate option from /etc/resolv.conf and put a dot after nfs-server-host-name in /etc/fstab to prevent domain search (which occurred even when there was no search option in /etc/resolv.conf), i.e.:

nfs-server-host-name.:/nfs/export/...
                    ^
                    ^---up here

It may have something to do with kernel build option CONFIG_NFS_USE_LEGACY_DNS, which is set to yes on my kernel.

The behaviour of nfs-client (and nfs-client only) was that it only queried the second nameserver in /etc/resolv.conf no matter how many there were as long as the rotate option was present. It did, however, work when there was no second nameserver at all. Beats me...

Solution 2:

The showmount command has an RPC call which uses gethostbyname_r to attempt to get information for a hostname. It does not do much to interpret errors returned by it. Could you run a test to see what the error actually is? This code is modified from the actual glibc clnt_gen.c code seen here

Example C source:

#include <netdb.h>
#include <alloca.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <errno.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    struct hostent hostbuf, *h;
    size_t hstbuflen;
    char *hsttmpbuf;
    char *hostname;
    int herr;

    if (argc != 2)
    {
      exit(-1);
    }
    hostname = argv[1];

    hstbuflen = 1024;
    hsttmpbuf = alloca(hstbuflen);
    while (gethostbyname_r (hostname, &hostbuf, hsttmpbuf, hstbuflen, &h, &herr) != 0 || h == NULL)
    {
        if (herr != NETDB_INTERNAL || errno != ERANGE)
        {
            printf("gethostbyname_r error: %s\n", hstrerror(herr));
            exit(0);
        }
        else
        {
            hstbuflen *= 2;
            hsttmpbuf = alloca (hstbuflen);
        }
    }
}

Save this as ghbntest.c and compile with the command gcc -o ghbntest ghbntest.c. Run using ./ghbntest nfs-server-host-name. Output example:

$ ./ghbntest 12345.example.com
gethostbyname_r error: Unknown host