8.10 Extremely Long Boot Time

[t_hutch]

Greetings,

My recent installation of mythbuntu 8.10 on my media center has resulted in extremely long boot times (10+ minutes). Watching the boot, I find that it hangs at "Starting NFS Common Utilities". Once it is done, it displays failed in red. Later in the boot, it also hangs on something to do with NTP (I'm not sure of the actual message, as I'm not currently in front of the machine). This is my second installation of 8.10 and both times I had this problem (I'm re-intstalling for different reasons).

This is an absolutely fresh install and there are no network mounts in the fstab file. While this isn't stopping me from using the system, it is extremely frustrating every time I have to reboot. Has anyone else run into this? Does anyone have a solution?

Thanks,
Tim

[TMcC]

Could you post the /var/log/kern.log, /var/log/messages, and /var/log/syslog as attachments please?

[t_hutch]

Thanks for the reply. I'll post those when I get home tonight.

[t_hutch]

Here are the logs you suggested I post.

Thanks,
Tim

[TMcC]

Try booting your kernel with the "noacpi" option, by editing your grub boot parameters.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1013088 shows a similar long delay before "ACPI: WMI: Mapper loaded"

[t_hutch]

No luck. noacpi doesn't help. I've got a better look at the boot now. Here is the lines it hangs on.

*Starting NFS common utilities
*Starting NTP server ntpd
(after a looooooong wait) [fail]

then a few lines later...

*Starting NTP server ntpd
...done.
(after a looooooong wait) [fail]

then is does...

*Starting NTP server ntpd

again, but this time it immediately says [OK]

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
Tim

[TMcC]

http://fixunix.com/ntp/544933-ntpd-q-slow-compared-ntpdate.html

Have you tried disabling ntpd at boot, and then just starting manually after boot?

[parker13]

You can install bootchart, which gives you a graph detailing the boot process and how long each part takes:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BootCharting

[t_hutch]

I'm not really following the thread you sent on disabling ntpd at boot. Is there a command to put on the kernel line that will disable it? How do I start it once booted? Something in a bash script?

[TMcC]

http://pthree.org/2008/02/26/managing-services-in-ubuntu-part-i-an-introduction-to-runlevels/

http://pthree.org/2008/02/27/managing-services-in-ubuntu-part-ii-managing-runlevels/