Comment 60 for bug 525154

Hmmm, that suggests there are two or three problems here:

    1) upstart cannot correctly identify when it is safe to start certain jobs
    2) rpc.statd may not fail cleanly if launched in an unsafe system state (maybe)
    3) mountall doesn't always respond to SIGUSR1 (maybe)

I'm not observing (2) -- but I'm not running a real server, so my observations may be simplistic. Are you in a position to debug what's going on with statd?

For (3), it's a long shot, but this might be related to an old known issue affecting responsiveness to signals which I observed in the libnih code, but never observed at runtime - see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libnih/+bug/518921. AFAICT from the code, this issue still potentially exists.

@David: It would be interesting if you could try my fix for this to see if it makes any difference for you. (You can download updated libnih and mountall packages from my PPA https://launchpad.net/~dave-martin-arm/+archive/ppa, assuming they've finished building.)

Using "start on filesystem and ..." seems to give me a working statd in that clients don't hang, but I guess since you have NFS mounts in fstab this won't work in your case. With the default start condition, I get no statd running at all, but can manually do "start statd" and that works too. I don't seem to end up with the half-working state you saw in this configuration.