Is S25mdadm start script priority correct?

Question

(On Ubuntu 11.10 - configuration inherited from 10.10)

Occasionally the boot process seems to suffer a race condition where a starting process misses some of the Raid-1 FSes, build via mdadm.

Looking at the start script, runlevel 5, (3 is similar anyway)

K00ntop
S15bind9
S16openvpn
S20kerneloops
S20nfs-kernel-server
S20nginx
S20php5-fpm
S20postfix
S20speech-dispatcher
S20winbind
S20xinetd
S23ntp
S25bluetooth
S25mdadm
...

There a bunch of processes started before mdadm, and nginx has some of web data on a MD array. While it's unlikely someone accesses the server at this very time, I wonder if it could be the reason.

Actually, I'm a bit surprised mdadm to be started that late in the boot process.
Is it not/recommended to run it earlier, say S10?

Answer 1

S25mdadm turns on RAID monitoring only. The RAIDs themselves are enabled, and the associated filesystems are fsck'd and mounted much earlier as part of the general system init procedure that precedes the running of the startup scripts in rcN.d.