I've noticed that mount.nfs calls bind (in `nfs_bind' in support/nfs/rpc_socket.c) before ultimately calling connect when trying to get a tcp connection to talk to the remote portmapper service (called from `nfs_get_tcpclient' which is called from `nfs_gp_get_rpcbclient'). Unfortunately, this means you need to find a local ephemeral port such that said ephemeral port is not a part of *any* existing TCP connection (i.e. you're looking for a unique 2 tuple of (socket_type, local_port) where socket_type is either SOCK_STREAM or SOCK_DGRAM, but in this case specifically SOCK_STREAM). If you were to just call connect without calling bind first, then you'd need to find a unique 5 tuple of (socket_type, local_ip, loacl_port, remote_ip, remote_port). The end result is a misbehaving application that creates many connections to some service, using all ephemeral ports, can cause attempts to mount remote NFS filesystems to fail with EADDRINUSE. Don't get me wrong, I think we should fix our application, (and we are) but I don't see any reason why mount.nfs couldn't just call connect without calling bind first (thereby allowing it to happen implicitly) and allowing mount.nfs to continue to work in this situation. I think an example may help explain what I'm talking about. Lets take a Linux machine running CentOS 6.5 (2.6.32-431.1.2.0.1.el6.x86_64) and restrict the number of available ephemeral ports to just 10: [cperl@localhost ~]$ cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range 60000 60009 Then create a TCP connection to a remote service which will just hold that connection open: [cperl@localhost ~]$ for in in {0..9}; do socat -u tcp:192.168.1.12:9990 file:/dev/null & done [1] 21578 [2] 21579 [3] 21580 [4] 21581 [5] 21582 [6] 21583 [7] 21584 [8] 21585 [9] 21586 [10] 21587 [cperl@localhost ~]$ netstat -n --tcp | awk '$6 ~ /ESTABLISHED/ && $5 ~/:999[0-9]$/ {print $1, $4, $5}' | sort | column -t tcp 192.168.1.11:60000 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.1.11:60001 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.1.11:60002 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.1.11:60003 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.1.11:60004 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.1.11:60005 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.1.11:60006 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.1.11:60007 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.1.11:60008 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.1.11:60009 192.168.1.12:9990 And now try to mount an NFS export: [cperl@localhost ~]$ sudo mount 192.168.1.100:/export/a /tmp/a mount.nfs: Address already in use As mentioned before, this is because bind is trying to find a unique 2 tuple of (socket_type, local_port) (really I believe its the 3 tuple (socket_type, local_ip, local_port), but calling bind with INADDR_ANY as `nfs_bind' does reduces it to the 2 tuple), which it cannot do. However, just calling connect allows local ephemeral ports to be "reused" (i.e. it looks for the unique 5 tuple of (socket_type, local_ip, local_port, remote_ip, remote_port)). For example, notice how the local ephemeral ports 60003 and 60004 are "reused" below (because socat is just calling connect, not bind, although we can make socat call bind with an option if we want and see it fail like mount.nfs did above): [cperl@localhost ~]$ socat -u tcp:192.168.1.12:9991 file:/dev/null & [11] 22433 [cperl@localhost ~]$ socat -u tcp:192.168.1.13:9990 file:/dev/null & [12] 22499 [cperl@localhost ~]$ netstat -n --tcp | awk '$6 ~ /ESTABLISHED/ && $5 ~/:999[0-9]$/ {print $1, $4, $5}' | sort | column -t tcp 192.168.0.11:60000 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.0.11:60001 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.0.11:60002 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.0.11:60003 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.0.11:60003 192.168.1.12:9991 tcp 192.168.0.11:60004 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.0.11:60004 192.168.1.13:9990 tcp 192.168.0.11:60005 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.0.11:60006 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.0.11:60007 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.0.11:60008 192.168.1.12:9990 tcp 192.168.0.11:60009 192.168.1.12:9990 Is there any reason we couldn't modify `nfs_get_tcpclient' to not bind in the case where its not using a reserved port? For some color, this is particularly annoying for me because I have extensive automount maps and this failure leads to attempts to access a given automounted path returning ENOENT. Furthermore, automount caches this failure and continues to return ENOENT for the duration of whatever its negative cache timeout is. For UDP, I don't think "bind before connect" matters as much. I believe the difference is just in the error you'll get from either bind or connect (if all ephemeral ports are used). If you attempt to bind when all local ports are in use you seem to get EADDRINUSE, whereas when you connect when all local ports are in use you get EAGAIN. It could be I'm missing something totally obvious for why this is. If so, please let me know! -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-nfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html