Apparently IBM made a silly change to rpc.mountd in AIX 5.2 ML01. It
goes like this. If you have an entry in /etc/services for mountd,
rpc.mountd binds to that port, but forgets to register with portmapper.
Thus, other hosts cannot NFS mount from the 5.2 ML01 host. Even other
AIX ML01 hosts!

Now, if you remove the mountd entry from /etc/services, then rpc.mountd
picks a random port and registers it with portmapper. The problem with
that is that certain versions of Linux do not handle it. I forget the
exact problem. It was either that Linux could not handle the TCP and
UDP mount services on different ports, or that if you stopped and
restarted rpc.mountd on the server, Linux clients would not pick up on
the changed port numbers. Whichever, the workaround in the past was to
put mountd entries in /etc/services so rpc.mountd always used the same
ports.

It's possible there is a similar problem with autofs and automount,
though I haven't investigated that enough yet.

--
Dale Talcott, IT Research Computing Services, Purdue University
aeh@quest.cc.purdue.edu http://quest.cc.purdue.edu/~aeh/