When networkmanager is used, OpenSuSe gets stuck during boot for 10 minutes

Question

I have this problem on all machines that I every installed (different configurations, different geographical locations, even different OpenSuSe versions) and it's extremely irritating.

When I turn on network manager, all machines simply hang during boot. It seems that they hang on mounting network file systems. This happens even if the machines are connected to wired network (I would understand if it would happen only on WiFi).

Now, this problem disappears if I turn of auto mounting of NFS partitions (each machine mount at least one), by setting the noauto in /etc/fstab.

A solution would be keeping the noauto and leaving the automount to some daemon, that is started later, or fixing the problem with network manager. Any ideas?

Answer 1

NFS seems to be a pain no matter what OS distribution you use. I've similar troubles on Debian with mounting on boot hanging for various periods of time (and that's without NetworkManager).

Now I automount my filesystems with autofs, just with simple direct mounts. I use autofs5 (the latest experimental branch, but I have no problems), but there's also autofs4.

Since switching to autofs (and removing the filesystems from /etc/fstab), NFS has been trouble-free.

To get you going quickly with autofs, I put the following line in /etc/auto.master:

/-      /etc/auto.direct        fstype=nfs4,tcp,noatime,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,intr,soft,sec=sys

and the following in /etc/auto.direct:

/av             av:/av
/data           data:/data
/home           home:/home
/src            data:/src
/var/mail       mail:/mail

I'm using NFSv4, but v3 is similar (just longer paths for the mounts).

Answer 2

I don't use OpenSUSE, but on Fedora, network connections seem to be started on login by default, not on bootup.

So I would guess that is the reason here too. NFS mount problems are usually caused by either lack of DNS, or no network. I would think the latter would be the case here (why would NetworkManager bring up the network but not configure DNS until later?)

There are some instructions here for another distro for automatically connecting at bootup time - I think they are complicated because they involve a wireless connection, so for a wired connection you should be able to skip some of those steps (and maybe just try the final step).

Answer 3

I've also had this problem, and it was caused by network filesystems being mounted too early in the boot process, at the same time as local filesystems. My distro eventually fixed it by splitting the process into two steps - first local filesystems are mounted, then the network is started, then network filesystems are mounted.

Before this I had edited my initscripts to mount everything in the background, so that it didn't hold the boot process up, and thanks to the 10 minutes of retries you have noticed as soon as the network came up the filesystems were mounted.