Why does 'exportfs -arv' return nothing and 'showmount -e' hang on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 machine ?

Issue

• On a machine which has NFS daemon running but nothing exported via /etc/exports, 'exportfs -arv' would not return anything but 'showmount -e' should return :

  # showmount -e 
  Export list for <hostname>
  

• Instead of returning an empty list, 'showmount -e' hangs. Why is this so ?

• From the output of 'strace' for 'showmount -e', there was a time out waiting for a reply on localhost :

  socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP) = 3
  bind(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(0), sin_addr=inet_addr("0.0.0.0")}, 16) = 0
  connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(111), sin_addr=inet_addr("158.140.72.209")}, 16) = -1 ETIMEDOUT (Connection timed out)
  close(3)