Mountd keeps dying

[Larry Thorne]

We have a 4D/70GT running IRIX 3.2.  All was going fine until 4 days ago when
the mount daemon (/usr/etc/rpc.mountd) starting dying.  It seems to live
until someone tries to mount or umount one of the SGI disks.  A possible
cause could be that we are mounting the SGI's disks on several more hosts
now, and the SGI is in turn also remote mounting disks from
all the same hosts (a sort of cross-mounting trick to make all file systems
available system-wide).  We have a Sun 4/280 & a Sun 4/260 and an Ardent
Titan playing this trick with the SGI.  Each of the three machines are
remote mounting 2 of the SGI's filesystems and the SGI is remote mounting
one filesystem from each of these other 3 machines.  Also, another client
of the 4/280 will occasionally remote mount one of the SGI filesystems, 
for backup/restore stuff, etc.  Also, I'm having to use the -n option on
rpc.mountd so that the Ardent isn't locked out of the game.

Anyhow, is this the cause of rpc.mountd dying?  Is there any way to get
an error message from rpc.mountd before it dies?  How can I tell what's
causing all this?  Do I need to start more nfsd processes?

Any and all info will be greatly appreciated!

Larry Thorne
larryt at ae.msstate.edu