NFS filesystems not auto-mounted at boot after upgrade to Beowulf

Question

After upgrading my desktop system from Devuan Ascii to Beowulf the system no longer mounts NFS filesystems at boot time. When I manually mount the fstab entries after the system finished booting everything works just fine. The mount option _netdev is set, but doesn't seem to have an effect (the behavior doesn't change whether it's present or not).

I did some research and saw the mount option x-systemd.automount being mentioned, so I tried adding that, but that also didn't change the behavior (and I would've been very surprised if it had).

Answer 1

At least on Beowulf (I didn't check for older releases) network filesystems are apparently mounted via /etc/network/if-up.d/mountnfs. For debugging I added a set -x and redirected the script output to a log file. After taking the network interface down and back up, I found a curious error message in the debug log:

42: /etc/init.d/rpcbind: stat: not found

mountnfs does attempt to start both portmap and rpcbind, and line 42 in the rpcbind init script simply checks owner, permissions and filetype of the service's state directory (/run/rpcbind):

if [ "$(LC_ALL=C stat -c '%U %g %a %F' "$STATEDIR")" != "_rpc 0 755 directory" ] ; then

which should work (and did so when I manually ran the command). However, the command is called without a path, and it's not a shell builtin, but a binary located in /usr/bin. Which reeks of a PATH issue. And sure enough, when I changed the command to full path, everything started working again:

if [ "$(LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/stat -c '%U %g %a %F' "$STATEDIR")" != "_rpc 0 755 directory" ] ; then

The root cause of the issue seems to be that /etc/network/if-up.d/mountnfs sets PATH=/sbin:/bin, while /etc/init.d/rpcbind apparently expects a less restrictive PATH, but doesn't bother ensuring that.