**** NFS mounts are always read-only since kernel 2.6.20 on client ****

Q: Since I run kernel 2.6.20 on my NFS clients some NFS mounts that I mount
explictly read-write appear to be read-only, no matter what I try. With
older kernels it all works fine. The kernel version of the NFS server
doesn't seem to be the culprit.

A: If 2 NFS filesystems are on the same physical partition on the serverside
and the first one is mounted read-only, the second will be mounted read-only
as well. A simple way to fix this is to put the read-write mounts first in
the /etc/fstab.

So, this goes wrong :

# cat /etc/fstab
...
prz01:/opt  /opt        nfs       ro,nolock,soft 0 0
prz01:/home /home       nfs       rw,intr        0 0

But this works fine :
# cat /etc/fstab
...
prz01:/home /home       nfs       rw,intr        0 0
prz01:/opt  /opt        nfs       ro,nolock,soft 0 0

Note that the second mount will be indeed a read-only mount, so you don't
have to fear that you may compromise your system in doing this.

With /opt and /home in this example on 2 different disks/partitions on the
server nothing goes wrong in either way.

Kees Lemmens,
July 2007.