Comment 19 for bug 1125726

Nathan: How many interfaces or IP's are you bringing up? That error message makes it sound like there could be a lot of contention on the lock. Could you also get the output of `pstree | grep -B3 lockfile` while a VM is coming up? (You'll need to attach to a free virtual terminal using the kvm console).

Upon reading more of the lockfile-create manpage, it appears that there's a non-configurable 5-minute timeout on stale locks. Setting the --use-pid option might free up the lock more quickly if the parent process has died for some reason.

It's not clear to me how this could prevent networking from coming up, since the network has to be up for NTP to run, and the if-up.d script backgrounds the ntpdate locking+syncing script. sshd in 12.04 and 14.04 is started from an upstart script which does not depend on the NTP service. The NTP service itself is fairly early in the sysvinit order at S23, so there might be other init scripts blocked behind it.