💾 NFS not starting, because portmapper is not running

23 Mar 2016

Recently i’ve faced some issues with nfs-kernel-server and nfs-common exiting during startup. It is very annoying, since until the above services not restarted after every (re)boot there is no file sharing. The reason is that the services are not started in proper order and nfs services would rely on the portmapper (rpcbind) service. If you see the same warning about portmapper as on the screenshot, then read further about how to fix it.

Runlevel needs to be modified in the nfs-common and rpcbind init files:
```
/etc/init.d/nfs-common
/etc/init.d/rpcbind
```

Replace the line around the top:

# Default-Start:     S

with this line:

# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5

Save it. Then the changed init scripts needs to be removed from rc.d, otherwise updating is going to fail.

update-rc.d -f rpcbind remove
update-rc.d rpcbind defaults

update-rc.d -f nfs-common remove
update-rc.d nfs-common defaults

Just to be sure do the nfs-kernel-server package also (at least i did):

update-rc.d -f nfs-kernel-server remove
update-rc.d nfs-kernel-server defaults

That’s it, reboot and nfs should be up and running.

Source(s): NFS Server: Not starting: portmapper is not running

@GregNau

💾 NFS not starting, because portmapper is not running