Running “ls -la /” hangs, yet running “ls -la” to other root directories  (i.e. ls -la /usr) does NOT hang. And the system logs ( i.e. /var/adm/messages) shows NFS related errors, even though this is NOT a true NFS client.

Here are the some sample errors that may appear in the /var/adm/messages file when the “ls -la /” hangs:

Mar 28 09:23:19 moe nfs: [ID 333984 kern.notice] NFS server for volume management (/vol) not responding still trying
Mar 28 09:31:13 moe nfs: [ID 664466 kern.notice] NFS getattr failed for server for volume management (/vol): error 23 (RPC: Unitdata error)

In this particular situation, this client was mounting a CD remotely from another system, which was shutdown before unsharing the CD, and before the client could unmount the remote CD mount. The tail end of a truss shows that it was hanging on /vol as well (line numbers set and it was hanging on line 256-257):

# cd /
# truss -fall -vall -wall -rall ls -la

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To prevent network break-ins, the “-nosuid” option is used in  ”/etc/vfstab” and the “/etc/auto*” configuration files  used for NFS mounting filesystems.
In “/var/adm/messages”, (the system log files),  the following type of message appears frequently:

“Date machinename enterprise: save,uid 0:setuid execution not allowed”

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This article will help you to understand some of the basic troubleshooting instructions for NFS problems …
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NFS mounts in /etc/vfstab with the “mount at boot” field set to yes are not mounted at boot time. Full Story