Originally posted by OmniX:
any idea what RPC is?
RPC = Remote Procedure Call
You can use the command 'rpcinfo -p' to find out the status of all your RPC dependent programs and services that are running on your local machine. If you want to find out what is running on, say, the server do: 'rpcinfo -p serverIP'. See 'man rpcinfo' for more info.
Portmapper is the portmap daemon that deals with all the RPC stuff. Its name is descriptive... it maps the ports for the program number of the RPC programs. See 'man portmap' for more info.
If portmap dies on the client machine it has to be restarted. Simplest thing is to reboot. Also all services that come after portmap will have to be restarted. Some will start as they are needed some not... all depends on what you are running that depends on portmap. That is why it is simplest to reboot.
If portmap dies on the server it has to be restarted. It should not require a reboot... AND all portmap/RPC based services will have to be restarted after portmap has started. Though it is often simpler to reboot.
My guess is that either your server (on client and/or server) has died or you are having network congestion problems. You should be able to troubleshoot better using rpcinfo.
Is your NFS server running *BSD, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X? If so which version? I ask because there may be some issues with file locking. While NFS is pretty standard and has been around for decades, file locking has been done a little (a lot!) differently on each implementation. Mac OS X only implemented file locking on NFS with 10.3.x and it was only compatible with FreeBSD and Mac OS X NFS servers. Apple seems to have fixed that since 10.3.5 (I think).
Oh and one other thing... check to see if your firewall has been turned on. If it is either turn it off or check the "allow" box for 'rpcbind (111)'.