So I've been away from Ubuntu for the past year, but decided to go back now that the gnome remix is out for 12.10.

I'm having some seriously long stalls if I try to mount my nfs mounts on my centos 6.2 server during bootup. If I manually mount them, they come up right away. Although if I let it try to mount at bootup, it still takes awhile to mount even manually. I can have a browser opened with 10 tabs loaded and NFS still hasn't mounted, so the network's definitely ready by then. It takes about a minute after it's gotten to the desktop to mount the share via fstab.

Right now, I've got it in my fstab like so
192.168.0.9:/data/smb /mnt/smb nfs proto=tcp,port=2049,_netdev,async,hard,intr 0 0

Originally I had it by hostname, but tried doing it by IP, just in case it wasn't resolving that early in the boot process. I have the IP of the server in my /etc/hosts on the ubuntu clients, as well as their IPs in the /etc/hosts on the server. None of that should have been necessary as I have a DNS server with reverse dns for all those systems, but threw that in the hosts files just to make sure.

The proto=tcp,port=2049 in the fstab is recent, I found that in the ubuntu nfs howto, so figured I'd try that, but it hasn't helped.

Network manager has the connection available to all users.

I could do autofs, I just hate using that, since it's so convoluted. Plus under fc17, nautilus would hard lock the system if you left a nautilus window open inside a folder that autofs unmounted while the system was idle. Not sure if that's going to be a problem under ubuntu.