[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Why do we fall back to trying /sbin/portmap?

[Miquel van Smoorenburg]

On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 22:28 -0200, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Jan 2006, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> > [Thomas Hood]
> > > In mountnfs.sh, why do we fall back to trying to start /sbin/portmap
> > > directly if /etc/init.d/portmap not present?
> > 
> > I have no idea, on several levels.  First of all, I do not understand
> > why we start portmap, because portmap isn't needed to be a NFS client.
> 
> What about the NFS RPC services, like locking?

Yes, you do need it for that. Clients need to run rpc.rstatd so that the
rpc.lockd on the server can check to see if a client is still alive, or
has rebooted, in order to potentially invalidate any stale locks.
Ofcourse rpc.rstatd needs to register with the portmapper.

> > No idea.  I do not really understand why it is there in the first
> > place.
> 
> Neither do I :(  Miquel might

Well that code was changed after sarge by an NMU. At first it didn't
look at /etc/init.d/portmap at all, it just started /sbin/portmap. It
just is lower overhead, and it avoids the 1 second delay
in /etc/init.d/portmap. Well that's the reason I just now thought up, it
might have been something else :) But the 1 second delay still sucks.

Mike.