Incorrect "no room" message on nfs-mounted /var/lib/dpkg

[David Gaudine <david@annette.concordia.ca>]

I installed the Debian 1.3.1 base system from diskettes, on a system that
has only 32 megs disk space (not counting the swap partition).
I copied /usr and /var/lib/dpkg to a larger system (this one) and did
NFS mounts;

   Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
   /dev/hda1              31724    7096    22990     24%   /
   annette:/linuxsrv     474227  263166   186567     59%   /linuxsrv
   annette:/linuxsrv/huey_usr
                         474227  263166   186567     59%   /usr
   annette:/linuxsrv/huey_dpkg
                      474227  263166   186567     59%   /var/lib/dpkg

I then tried to complete the installation by using dselect to install
the default list of packages by ftp.  Everything proceeds as expected
until it's ready to download the packages.  Then, after the list of
required packages, I get

   Approximate total space required: 33224k
   Available space in debian: 59%k

and it refuses to download more than two or three packages.  This is my
second attempt at the installation, the first time the message was

   Available space in debian: k

If I do the installation without using NFS mounts, the available space
is displayed correctly, but is too small to be useful.

Any ideas?  How does dpkg-ftp determine the available disk space?
If all else fails I'll get a CDROM and try again, which I've avoided
so far mainly because I'd have to use NFS to access the cdrom, and
probably run into another set of problems.


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