NFS mounts in fstab are not mounted during startup on RHEL

Question

I have run into a problem with auto mounting nfs exports on a RHEL 6 server. To give you a brief configuration and what I have tried, I’m mounting 6 NFS exported shares from the network. Unfortunately none of the mounts in fstab come up.

• The mount directories exist, and are in the fstab file.
• I have verified that nfs and netfs are both running at rc3 and the network is up before netfs starts up.
• The system is mounting its / (nfs root) from the same network server I am attempting to get the other shares from, so I am 100% sure the network is up and the server is reachable.
• fstab is correct since 'mount -a' works as expected once the system is up.

One solution would be to create a script that runs at the end of start-up and calls mount –a, but I really do not want to do that. I have referenced some other ‘solutions’ found on the internet but they have not worked. Here is a common problem, but it does not apply to my case, http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-server-73/nfs-entries-in-etc-fstab-not-mounting-on-boot-546512/

My fstab file (note I added _netdev to two for testing...):

oc:/usr/PET     /usr/PET    nfs     hard,intr,nolock,noatime,_netdev  0 0
oc:/usr/g       /oc/usr/g   nfs     hard,intr,nolock,noatime,_netdev  0 0
oc:/usr/lib     /oc/usr/lib     nfs     hard,intr,nolock,noatime     0 0
oc:/usr/lib32   /oc/usr/lib32   nfs     hard,intr,nolock,noatime     0 0
oc:/usr/lib64   /oc/usr/lib64   nfs     hard,intr,nolock,noatime     0 0

Answer 1

It turns out that the init script for netfs has the following:

[ -f /etc/sysconfig/network ] || exit 0

That file did not exist in my RHEL 6 install, possibly because it was a very minimal install, I'm not sure. Regardless, looking at another machine, I created the file with the following:

NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=localhost.localdomain

Rebooted, and everything worked as expected.