In this case, the brain dead sysadmin would be moi :) For years I've been using NFS to share /usr/portage with all of the gentoo machines on my LAN.
Problem: occasionally it stops working for no apparent reason. Example: two days ago I updated two ~amd64 gentoo machines, both of which have been mounting /usr/portage as NFS3 shares for at least a year with no problems. One machine worked normally after the update, the other was unable to mount /usr/portage because rpc.statd wouldn't start correctly. After two frustrating days I discovered that I had never enabled the rpcbind.service on the "broken" machine. So I enabled rpcbind, which fixed the breakage. So, why did the "broken" machine work normally for more than a year without rpcbind until two days ago? (I suppose because nfs-utils was updated to 1.3.0 ?) The real problem here is that I have no idea how NFS works, and each new version is more complicated because the devs are solving problems that I don't understand or even know about. So, please, what's the best way to learn and understand NFS? Thanks for any clues.
