# VM is running FreeBSD and getting a port mapper failure



## Dricksus (Jun 12, 2019)

Hello everyone! first off, totally new here. this is my first experience with FreeBSD. so to start, I just started my new job at this company, and they had a few months back inherited some dell blade servers from one of the other offices that closed down. Im told they were able to login to this VM until very recently. Now, it is kicking out the below error:

[tcp] %IPADDRESS%:/data/autobuilder/downloads: RPCPROG_NFS: RPC: Port mapper failure - RPC: Timed out

I can't get into the VM at all and the information on it is crucial, so im trying to resolve this error so it boots normally so they can get the pertinent info they need.

Apologies if this is in the wrong place, new here and to FreeBSD so im stumbling along 

%IPADDRESS% isnt what it actually says, I just put that there instead of the actual IP Address


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## SirDice (Jun 13, 2019)

RPC is used for NFS, not SSH. And judging by the error a NFS share is timing out. Is the NFS server still alive? A NFS filesystem could hang up the whole filesystem indefinitely, causing _everything_ that needs disk access (even if if doesn't involve the NFS share) to stall. 

I suspect the VM just lost its network connection through the host, I've seen this happen with Xen server and VMWare server. I've also seen this happen with a variety of guest OS, so the issue isn't specific to FreeBSD. 

As nobody is now able to access the system, have you tried the most basic of troubleshooting? Like turning it off and on again? It's a VM so somebody will have console access through the VM management software. Turn the VM off, then on again and watch the console.


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## Dricksus (Jun 13, 2019)

I have, I have direct acccess to the VMWare server in question, and I've rebooted it a bunch, the whole server, not even just individual VM. one thing that I think has changed or changed just before I got here, is we are behind a Fortigate firewall now. I almost wonder if its blocking the NFS TCP port.


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## SirDice (Jun 13, 2019)

Dricksus said:


> is we are behind a Fortigate firewall now. I almost wonder if its blocking the NFS TCP port.


That's definitely a possibility. Note that NFS (v3) uses more than just a single TCP port. For NFSv4 you only need one but NFSv3 requires a lot more including a bunch of dynamic RPC ports.


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## Dricksus (Jun 13, 2019)

well, definitely not ports, I opened it up on the firewall and nothing. still port mapper timing out. that sucks, im thinking maybe what it is trying to mount just isn't operational anymore which would really suck.


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## SirDice (Jun 14, 2019)

Dricksus said:


> im thinking maybe what it is trying to mount just isn't operational anymore which would really suck.


Find out where that NFS server is, double check if it's still there and the NFS exports are still shared. Perhaps the server is still around but somebody may have given it a different IP address, I presume that %IPADDRESS% was an actual IP address, not a hostname. If it's a hostname double check things like DNS or hosts files.


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