DNS Fails for NFS Server Shares

Question

When I boot, I get a message that DNS has failed for the NFS server mounts, and the shares do not mount. The message says, "mount.nfs: DNS resolution failed for server: name or service unknown." I have to mount the shares myself. Then when rebooting, I get the same error saying it can't unmount the shares.
this is /etc/resolv.conf:
$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
# Generated by dhcpcd from eth0
# /etc/resolv.conf.head can replace this line
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
# /etc/resolv.conf.tail can replace this line
this is /etc/conf.d/nfs:
# Number of servers to be started up by default
NFSD_OPTS=8
# Options to pass to rpc.mountd
# e.g. MOUNTDOPTS="-p 32767"
MOUNTD_OPTS="--no-nfs-version 1 --no-nfs-version 2"
# Options to pass to rpc.statd
# N.B. statd normally runs on both client and server, and run-time
# options should be specified accordingly. Specifically, the Arch
# NFS init scripts require the --no-notify flag on the server,
# but not on the client e.g.
# STATD_OPTS="--no-notify -p 32765 -o 32766" -> server
# STATD_OPTS="-p 32765 -o 32766" -> client
STATD_OPTS=""
# Options to pass to sm-notify
# e.g. SMNOTIFY_OPTS="-p 32764"
SMNOTIFY_OPTS=""
Do I need to add some option to rpc.statd, or is there some other misconfiguration there? AFAIK it is the default. What else should I look at to fix this? I can ping the server by name, and log in with ssh by name, just fine. It's only the nfs that is failing with DNS.

Answer 1

airman99 wrote:
Yahoo! Good news, I've finally solved the problem on my laptop. The message I was receiving turned out merely to be a network timing issue.
The error I was receiving was exactly correct and informative. When /etc/rc.d/netfs ran and executed a 'mount -a -t nfs...' the network was indeed NOT reachable. I am running networkmanager, and apparently during bootup, networkmanager gets loaded, but there is a delay between when networkmanager is loaded and when the network is available. In other words, networkmanager allows the boot process to continue before the network is available.
My daemons are loaded in this order (rc.conf):
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng hal dhcdbd networkmanager crond cups ntpdate ntpd portmap nfslock netfs)
Consequently, if I add a delay to /etc/rc.d/netfs to allow time for the network to come up, then when the NFS shares are mounted, the network is up. In my case I had to add a 3 second delay.
sleep 3
I'm sure this isn't the best way to solve the problem, by editing the system file /etc/rc.d/netfs, because the next upgrade where changes occur to netfs, my fix will get overwritten. But I'll keep it until I figure out the "right" fix.
The real solution is to not load networkmanager in the background, but to force startup to wait for the networok to be up before continuing.
there is the _netdev option you can use in fstab, but that doesn't always work:
http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount
_netdev
    The filesystem resides on a device that requires network access (used to prevent the system from attempting to mount these filesystems until the network has been enabled on the system).
Alternatively, you could just add a cronjob to do a mount -a with a sleep 20 in there or something. You might have to play with the sleep value a little to make sure it's long enough