A mounting question for multiple machines?

[Paul Migliorelli (+1 3 0 3 5 1 9 5 3 4 6)]

Hi all.  Here's a question from Curtis Willoughby, regarding some of our 
office setup.  Allas, I have no clue as always.  Thanks much.

We seem to be having trouble with nfs.
When attempting to mount a file system from another machine, we actually get
a local file system mounted.

The kernel we are using is from slackware 10.0, and, of course,
it could have been fixed in a later release.  Here is the uname -a info:

Linux (machine2) 2.4.26 #33 Mon Jun 14 19:26:13 PDT 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux

Mount -v gives:

mount: mount-2.12a

We are using md to achieve raid 1 on most of the local
file systems.  In particular the local file system that gets
mounted incorrectly is a raid 1 file system.

The fstab entry that missbehaves is as follows:

(ip_address_of_machine1):/netshare              /mnt/otserver                   nfs    defaults,async,_netdev        0 0

We are cross-mounting these file systems.  I.e., each machine
in the pair has the ability to mount a file system having the
same name from the other machine.  There was once a problem
with this kind of plan, so we umounted the mount in the
opposite direction, and that did not help.

We found an ethernet interface up on the problem machine without
an ip address, and turning that down did not fix the problem.

We are using the reiserfs, which is apparently a relatively
new journaling file system, but we cannot immagine that that
could cause this trouble.

The other machine in the pair has redhat 7.3, running:

Linux (machine1) 2.4.20-20.7spk2a #1 Fri Oct 10 00:25:03 MDT 2003 i686 unknown

It is not using raiding, is using ext3, and works correctly.

Does anyone on this list know of this problem, and its solution?
Does anyone know anyone who would like to help troubleshoot it?
or can anyone suggest any troubleshooting methods to further
diagnose the problem?