Comment 9 for bug 1590799

I confirm that this bug also affects my Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-51-lowlatency i686) system (with all updates as of today, even those from xenial-proposed).

However, in my case the failure (rpc.mountd[<number>]: mountd: could not create listeners) occured only in about 50% of all boot processes and the system booted without this failure elsewise.

Using journalctl I could narrow the error down: It is a race condition: The error occurs when rpcbind is not yet ready when rpc.mountd is started and it does not occur when rpcbind is already ready at the time rpc.mountd starts.

So Malcolm Scott gives the correct solution (add dependency and order information to systemd) in comment #6. I created the snippet /etc/systemd/system/nfs-mountd.service.d/rpcbind-dep.conf:

[Unit]
Wants=rpcbind.service
After=rpcbind.service

and updated the initramfs (update-initramfs -u) and now the bug has gone. For a clean bug fix the above two lines should be added to /lib/systemd/system/nfs-mountd.service by the maintainers of the nfs-kernel-server package.