When nis server is not reachable during startup, system gets very slow and HAL fails to initialise

[Arne Nordmann]

When the nis server is not reachable during start up (e.g. cable not connected, network not reachable, ...) an error with HAL (hardware abstraction layer) is raised and system gets incredibly slow.

First during boot it fails to connect to ypbind server (expected behaviour int his case).
(see first screenshot)

After that the boot process and start of gdm gets incredibly slow (two or more minutes). Login as local user is possible (although lasting several minutes, again very slow), then GNOME settings manager raises an error. (see second screenshot)

After confirming, the following error message is raised after two or more minutes:
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Internal error - failed to initialize HAL!
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(see third screenshot)

I assigned this bug to package 'nis' although I'm not sure if this is really a nis issue but an issue with the init process.
Error can be reproduced inside a virtual machine (e.g. virtualbox) with virtual network cable not connected.

[Mark Brown (broonie)]

Poor performance when the NIS server is unavailable is expected: the clients will attempt to contact the NIS server and have to time out when that fails.

[Kevin Kraatz (kkraatz)]

This appears related to bug #50430. It makes booting take forever because NIS is trying to bind to the domain and can't find the network, which then appears to break lots of other stuff (HAL, networking, etc.) I am seeing this behavior with the Intrepid Ibex beta and remember seeing this kind of behavior with the Gutsy beta also. The problem as I see it is that nis, and autofs, have a priority in the init process before Network Manager, thus they start before the network is totally configured. The way I fixed the issue on my system was to go into the /etc/rcX.d directories and change the hard links so that NIS and autofs start after Network Manager. (Thus S18nis becomes S31nis and S19autofs becomes S32autofs). This fixed all of the issues I had with NIS and autofs. It seems much simpler than some of the other suggestions such as completely removing Network Manager, etc.