Issues with smartd starting up at boot time - delays sever start?

[Karl Pielorz]

Hi,

I've noticed on our systems (9.0-Stable, amd64) that starting smartd at 
boot time massively extends the startup time of the box.

I think I've traced this down to smartd, and our use of the '-M test' 
config option (which sends a test message, apparently forking to 'mail' - 
and, as the config man page says - it will block until that command 
returns).

For whatever reason (networking not stable at that point in time, MTA not 
started yet etc.) - on our machines this leaves smartd handing around for 
minutes - before it returns, the machine starts up (and the status emails 
arrive).

Can anyone think of a 'simple' fix for this? - Is there anything I can do 
to '/usr/local/etc/rc.d/smartd' to make it run later in the startup process?

Does the dreaded '/etc/rc.local' still get run -after- everything else? 
(Worst case I could launch it from there).

Thanks,

-Karl