Actually, on further investigation, i've determined it's better to abuse TR for this, changing the 'ports=' lines to include calls to tr to swap the carriage returns for spaces.
ports="$(rpcinfo -p |awk "/tcp.*$service/"' { print $4 }' | uniq | tr '\n' ' ')" it was complicated to debug, as restarting the first time after a failure didn't trigger, but the second time does. with these changes, i see the proper output in the syslog: Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Enabling RPC service(s) portmapper status statd nfs mountd nlockmgr for net(s) 10.0.2.0/24 Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding TCP ports 111 for RPC service portmapper Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding UDP ports 111 for RPC service portmapper Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding TCP ports for RPC service status Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding UDP ports for RPC service status Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding TCP ports for RPC service statd Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding UDP ports for RPC service statd Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding TCP ports 2049 for RPC service nfs Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding UDP ports 2049 for RPC service nfs Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding TCP ports 34943 40573 40653 for RPC service mountd Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding UDP ports 59663 50989 33098 for RPC service mountd Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding TCP ports 45913 for RPC service nlockmgr Apr 14 13:42:43 qemuhost arno-iptables-firewall[2260537]: Adding UDP ports 45674 for RPC service nlockmgr and NFS is functional. On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 9:21 PM Debian Bug Tracking System < ow...@bugs.debian.org> wrote: > Thank you for the additional information you have supplied regarding > this Bug report. > > This is an automatically generated reply to let you know your message > has been received. > > Your message is being forwarded to the package maintainers and other > interested parties for their attention; they will reply in due course. > > Your message has been sent to the package maintainer(s): > Debian Security Tools <team+pkg-secur...@tracker.debian.org> > > If you wish to submit further information on this problem, please > send it to 956...@bugs.debian.org. > > Please do not send mail to ow...@bugs.debian.org unless you wish > to report a problem with the Bug-tracking system. > > -- > 956552: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=956552 > Debian Bug Tracking System > Contact ow...@bugs.debian.org with problems >