Today we had a customer mention that when they reboot their servers (running RHEL 5), the NFS mounts specified in /etc/fstab were not coming up automatically. A quick google search reveiled that the netfs service needs to be running (which it wasn’t). I played around a bit on my test boxes and sure enough NFS mounts are not mounted automatically when that service is disabled.
On a side note, I also had to add “NETWORKDELAY=60″ to /etc/sysconfig/network otherwise netfs would start up before eth0 was up and running correctly. This fix was found here.