nfs exports

["Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom" <carls@agritech.com>]

        I'm trying to devise a recovery-from-backup scheme for my network. 
        the theory is; if a machine dies; all I should have to do is insert
a tomsrtbt disk into the new machine; boot from that; nfs-mount the tape
drive on a server; and restore from the last backup tape over nfs.
        this is what I thought I had heard of people doing.

        however, I can't seem to export the tape drive (/dev/st0) as an nfs
export. the client always says:
mount: <serverIP>:/dev/st0 failed, reason given by server; Permission denied.

on the server:
        /var/lib/nfs/xtab seems to show it as an available mount point;
        but /proc/fs/nfs/exports shows nothing. :(

        if I do a exportfs -av <IPaddress of client>:/dev/st0; it complains
about /dev/st0 not being a directory.
        I've chmod'ed /dev/st0 to 664 (instead of the 660 it used to be);
wondering if that would make a difference.
        I've made sure portmapper is running; and allowed connections to it
(from our subnet) in /etc/hosts.allow
        I've started and stopped and restarted nfs several times

this is using knfsd on a RH 6.1 box.

could it be that nfs refuses to export a device?

my only other experience with NFS has been on a RH 5.2 box... which seemed
to be infinitely easier. (then again, I wasn't trying the same thing...)


Carl Soderstrom
System Administrator    307 Brighton Ave. 
Minnesota DHIA	        Buffalo, MN	
carls@agritech.com      (612) 682-1091