FWIW I've confirmed locally with strace that statd is looking in /var/lib/nfs (/var/lib/nfs/sm; /var/lib/nfs/state) at start-up. I'm surprised that this is the case; I didn't explicitly test with /var on a separate partition when preparing these upstart jobs, but I think I would've checked for references to /var/lib/nfs in the code. At any rate, this behavior seems to have been in place since at least 12.04.
Given the requirement that this data persist across reboots (in fact, that's more or less the entire purpose of rpc.statd), I don't have a good solution for making this work with a separate /var partition at the moment.
FWIW I've confirmed locally with strace that statd is looking in /var/lib/nfs (/var/lib/nfs/sm; /var/lib/nfs/state) at start-up. I'm surprised that this is the case; I didn't explicitly test with /var on a separate partition when preparing these upstart jobs, but I think I would've checked for references to /var/lib/nfs in the code. At any rate, this behavior seems to have been in place since at least 12.04.
Given the requirement that this data persist across reboots (in fact, that's more or less the entire purpose of rpc.statd), I don't have a good solution for making this work with a separate /var partition at the moment.