NFS: Why Doesn't nfsd Start Automatically?

Question

This on a 2009 MacMini running 10.6.8
Bleach:~ mnewman$ showmount -e
Cannot MNT RPC: RPC: Port mapper failure - RPC: Timed out
can't connect socket for RPC
Bleach:~ mnewman$ ps -ax | grep nfsd
  594 ttys000    0:00.00 grep nfsd
Bleach:~ mnewman$ sudo nfsd enable
Password:
The nfsd service is already enabled.
Bleach:~ mnewman$ showmount -e
Exports list on localhost:
/Volumes/Media                      Everyone
And, why do I have to run restart twice?
Bleach:~ mnewman$ sudo nfsd restart
Bleach:~ mnewman$ ps -ax | grep nfsd
Bleach:~ mnewman$ sudo nfsd restart
The nfsd service does not appear to be running.
Starting the nfsd service
Bleach:~ mnewman$ ps -ax | grep nfsd
  631 ??         0:00.01 /sbin/nfsd -N
  634 ttys000    0:00.00 grep nfsd

Answer 1

Well, it's not that run() doesn't get invoked -- it's that it's not getting invoked in the order you expect, right?
I would think that this comes down to thread scheduling -- just because you create a thread and start it, it doesn't mean (I believe) that the thread's run() method is invoked either necessarily before or necessarily after the caller's Thread.start invocation returns. I believe that calling start() just tells the JVM to schedule the thread, and it decides when to actually do so.
To fix your code, I'd suggest fixing it so that there are no dependencies on run() being invoked before or after Applet.start() returns.
First of all, I'd suggest that not set isRunning after you call Thread.start(). Set isRunning to true before that. Or use some other way of tracking whether the thread should be running.
Secondly, I'd suggest that you stop catching Exceptions silently...