TCP/IP and NFS FAQ

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

This is an old article about SCO Unix and is only left here for historical purposes.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Why do I get "portmapper is not responding" errors?

"portmapper is not responding" usually means that there is an incorrect extra ip address in /etc/hosts for this machine. Remove the incorrect address( this usually happens when you change the tcp/ip address). Here's an example of what such a /etc/hosts file would look like:

#      @(#)hosts,v 6.1 1993/08/21 02:17:48 stevea Exp - STREAMware
TCP/IP  source
#      SCCS IDENTIFICATION
127.0.0.1       localhost 
10.1.36.8       scobox scobox.fredness.com
10.1.36.7       scobox scobox.fredness.com
 

The machine's IP address has been changed, but the old entry is still present. Remove it. This could also be caused by not having any entry in /etc/hosts, or by having an entry that is different than what ifconfig shows. An unconfigured network can cause this too, so a dhcp failure could do it (though of course then no networking would be working at all).

The portmapper is used by NFS, so you could also disable NFS startup by commenting it out of the startup files in /etc/rc2.d. If you need nfs, and everything else looks right, try "nfs stop;nfs start".

See also: http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?arg=102428

Michael DiCostanzo provided this:

I have an OpenServer 5.0.5 Enterprise server. The original name and IP address, call them NAME1 and IP1, were registered with our DNS servers. I had a need to change the name and IP address and did so, call these NAME2 and IP2. This name was also registered with our DNS. I had omitted to remove the original entry from the DNS.

I was getting the portmapper warning message after rebooting. I checked here and SCO and found the article which said to remove NAME1 and IP1 from the /etc/hosts. I did that yet still got the portmapper warning message.

I had some time recently and did some admin tests for other reasons. I found the article "How to change a system name or IP address on SCO Unix" and used it to find that NAME1 still was being used in some other files. Once I changed NAME1 to NAME2 in those files, the portmapper warning message went away.

This may be a second time when the portmapper warning is made. It's related to the first because the name change was not completely made. If anyone gets this warning and the /etc/hosts file is correct, it means that the name/IP address change was not complete.

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