[techtalk] problem on mount possible DNS issue??

[K. Ziel]

Hi all--

i'm currently working on a caldera box, and trying to get a partition to 
mount.  the partition is actually on a RAID,but i was able to fdisk and 
create the filesystem on the RAID, as well as to duplicate the mount problem 
with a different partition on a non-raid drive...so i don't think that the 
raid is the problem...<i am mentioning it *just in case*>.

when i try to mount the paritition, the mount command just hangs.  i've 
traced the command using strace, and found that it hangs right on the the 
mount() system call.  i cannot kill the process (am using -9).  shutdown and 
reboot seems to hang, which seems to be consistent with the problem i am 
seeing with mount.

I did some searching on the web, and found that someone else had this similar 
problem and it was an issue with the DNS....that for some reason it was't 
using localhost in the mount process... 

i don't have any problems with partitions mounting during bootup... i assume 
this is because DNS has not yet come into play.  ??

i've checked the files, and there were some questions, but i've reconfigured 
(see below) and everything seems to look fine now....  but this hasn't 
resolved the issue.  i do still have some things i'd like clarification on 
tho.

the resolve order has NIS in it...i'm unsure if the box is running NIS, but i 
doubt it.  from all the looking i've done, this doesn't seem like it would be 
/ could be an issue...but i wanted to check just in case.  (i will not be 
able to get to the box to configure until tomorrow...else i would have tried 
changing the order today....  but i'd like to go in with more ideas than just 
one...)

the search was set to a domain that isn't running DNS, so i reconfigured that 
but it didn't seem to help.  

also...there is a file called system.cnf, which i am unfamiliar with.... i 
don't know what impact this has on the system, but it did state the the DNS 
search was in that strange domain...manually editing that didn't have any 
impact either.  and something called 'lisa'  was used to configure the hosts 
file.  i saw that the lisa fileset contains the system.cnf file...but is this 
something that is actually part of the caldera base fileset?

are there more files similar to system.cnf that i should be looking for? i 
didn't see anything else in /etc, but i know that these things can tend to 
hide.  do i *have* to use lisa to redo this configuration, or should hand 
editing be fine?? if i want to find out where my problem is (still concerning 
DNS)...what else should i look at using strace on to see the impact?  

hints would be appreciated....and i apologize for the length of this 
question...i was trying to get as many facts that might be helpful in there 
as possible....

Kristin