Automounter and other stuff stopped working

Yesterday the automount of an nfs file system on a LAN (Debian) computer stopped working, and also opeing a window on the remote machine fails (although I can do ssh from an xterm with no problem)

Where should I start to look? I did update the packages yesterday if that is a factor. Cannot see any erros on the logs or via dmesg.

eg

ls /mnt/snout/home/jpff

ls: cannot access /mnt/snout/home/jpff: No such file or directory

after a long delay
/etc/auto.mnt says
snout -fstype=nfs,nfsvers=3,rw,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,user,suid

All suggestiond welcome

Apologies – I think I misidentified the problem, which I now think is a a problem wit hunbound on the remote machine