nfs mounting will hang a machine on bootup

[ECEG / Daniel Duerr]

Hi,

Had a very strange issue this week with my Freebsd 6.2 server on a p7  
kernel compiled on Aug 5.  Did a customary reboot on a machine which  
has an NFS mount in its fstab.  The machine didn't come back up,  
could not be reached by SSH, but could be pinged.  I drove 1.5 hours  
to the data center where the machine resides and discovered that it  
was hanging trying to mount the NFS share on the other machine --  
looping through a permission denied scenario and never continuing on  
with the bootup for the entire 1.5 hours.

I have two suggestions here, whether one, the other, or both make sense:

1) Move the sshd startup before the NFS mounting so that I can SSH  
into the machine to fix this issue.
2) If an NFS mount fails after X tries, just continue booting up and  
allow the situation to be remedied later.

I apologize in advance if I am missing some obvious parameter.  For  
what its worth, I followed the NFS setup described in the freebsd  
handbook on freebsd.org

Cheers,
Daniel