Comment 25 for bug 27520

You can achieve such a workaround, but it's prone to races and
unreliable. Better to fix cron and stop it from caching which user
exists or not.

My lucid /etc/init/cron.conf for NIS currently looks as given below, and
tested on some old-fashioned Pentium 4 HT computer that suffered
heavily, with two major changes:

A - I've added a pre-start that queries ypwhich up to 30 times to see
whether ypbind has started and bound to the server yet, sleeping 1 s
after failure. Since ypwhich itself employs timeouts, the actual wait
time is longer.

B - I've gotten rid of the "expect fork" and use cron's "don't fork
mode"; this is an unrelated cleanup and not needed for this particular
fix, and the -L2 also bumps up the cron log level.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
# cron - regular background program processing daemon
#
# cron is a standard UNIX program that runs user-specified programs at
# periodic scheduled times

description "regular background program processing daemon"

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]

# ma 2011-06-07 hack alert: defer start until ypwhich
# returns success, so that NIS can bind to the domain
# see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cron/+bug/27520
pre-start script
   count=30
   until ypwhich ; do
     count=$(( $count - 1 ))
     if [ $count = 0 ] ; then break ; fi
     sleep 1
   done
end script

respawn

exec cron -L2 -f
---------------------------------------------------------------------

--
Matthias Andree