ThompsG
yes -- these are two different NFS servers being mounted from the same host (at slightly different times). It was a troubleshooting step to narrow the troubleshooting scope. You can see a certain similarity in the way I set things up at different clients (in this case the .254.3 address is at my office), which makes it maybe not so obvious what I have done. The .3 is mostly random chance, but fixed IPs typically get assigned in the first 50 addresses, and NFS servers typically get set up pretty early in the process.
After getting some much-needed sleep (and a weekend, when time demands are not so intense), I am going to try patching up the local NFS server (.42.3) to current freeBSD 11.2 levels ( I think it is p9), and if that doesn't work, then to 12.0pX. I can do those without having to down the esxi box, and they are relatively reliable operations. I'll post the results when I've done it.
The ghettoVCB would normally run on sunday night, so I'm still withing normal "failure paramaters".
Thanks!