Why would mountd die?

[Chuck Swiger]

Tuc at Beach House wrote:
> 	We are having a problem on a 5.4 NFS server where at times
> mountd seems to be just "disappearing". Is there a good way to track
> that this happens, or to find out what causes it to die?

DJB's daemontools come to mind, also Big Brother (www.bb4.org) can monitor a 
system, keeping track of the running processes, and yell (ie, email you, page 
you, etc) if something bad happens.

The first step is to look for log messages (see mountd's "-d" flag), and to 
unlimit coredumpsize (see /etc/login.conf and the shell environment) and see 
whether you can get a coredump for gdb.

It'll help to rebuild mountd with -g for debugging purposes...

-- 
-Chuck