NFS Won't Start

[Bugs318]

After working fine for many months, suddenly my file sharing through NFS wouldn't connect. I went back to the book that help me set it up (as I am no expert), and attempted to restart the nfs server with the command

sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server start

It would not start and I got the following error:

Cannot register service: RPC: Unable to receive; errno = Connection refused [fail]

A bit of searching on the internet led to discovering that this is often a common problem surrounding the 'portmapper' not being on or the port being blocked. I am uncertain of what port this is shared over, so I don't know how to ensure it is unblocked (presumably by the firewall?), and I have no idea how to check if the portmapper is started (or how to start it, or even what it is - if this is indeed the problem).

Any help would be greatly appreciated and I thank you in advance!

[Bugs318]

If anyone can even hint at possible ways to resolve this that would be great as I am in quite desperate need of the file sharing, without which I am forced to constantly burn discs for file transfers.

Thanks again in advance!

[Bugs318]

After many hours of searching, I finally found instructions for how to restart portmapper and now it works fine. Why is this information so hard to find?!?

[airtonix]

Why is this information so hard to find?!?

Because people like you don't bother to mention where you found the information.

IRONY MUCH!???

[ChrisChambers]

I just stumbled across this post with the same issue on Ubuntu 11.10.

Doing the following commands rectified my NFS problem -

# service portmap restart
# service nfs-kernel-server restart