When booting my debian unstable linux box the process is delayed when it attempts to mount NFS partitions from another machine which is not switched on. The message displayed during boot is:
[*** ] A start job is running for /media/photos [1 of 4] [35s/1m 45s]
The stars on the left animate, and it cycles through the four mounts points I have defined in /etc/fstab
:
mnemosyne:/mnt/volume1/videos /media/videos nfs defaults 0 0
mnemosyne:/mnt/volume1/books /media/books nfs defaults 0 0
mnemosyne:/mnt/volume1/photos /media/photos nfs defaults 0 0
mnemosyne:/mnt/volume1/downloads /media/downloads nfs defaults 0 0
For a long time this setup has worked without the delay. If the machine with the mount points wasn't on, it would timeout immediately and continue a normal system boot.