mountlate not late enough for nfe0 with dhcp

[William Palfreman]

I find my nfe0 interface on my media server (an Acer Revo Atom) has not
finished dhcp by the time /etc/rc.d/mountlate is run, or
/etc/rc.d/mountcritremote.  So the two NFS filesystems I want to mount cause
booting to halt in the most inconvenient manner possible for a machine with
no keyboard.

I originally had this problem with mountcritremote, so I added the late
option to /ett/fstab:

nfshost:/share     /nfs            nfs     rw,late         0       0
nfshost:/data       /data          nfs     ro,late          0       0

But the network was still not up by the time /etc/rc.d/mountlate ran.  So I
slowed things down with the patch you can see below.

I am not saying that you should add something so crude to the base system,
but I do think that it would be better if failure to mount an NFS share due
to DHCP not being finished did not cause the boot to halt.  Non-root
filesystem NFS mounts are rarely so critical that is it necessary to drop
into single user mode instead - especially as these days many machines do
not have a console continuously attached. It would be better just to retry
mounting NFS in the background.

Here's how I slow it down, anyway.  Ten seconds seems to be plenty:

$ diff -u /usr/src/etc/rc.d/mountlate /etc/rc.d/mountlate
--- /usr/src/etc/rc.d/mountlate    2009-08-03 10:13:06.000000000 +0200
+++ /etc/rc.d/mountlate    2011-05-26 22:34:49.000000000 +0200
@@ -14,6 +14,13 @@
 start_cmd="mountlate_start"
 stop_cmd=":"

+ping -c1 -t1 8.8.8.8 > /dev/null
+if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
+  echo "Sleeping 10 waiting for network to come up"
+  sleep 10
+  ping -c1 -t1 8.8.8.8 > /dev/null || echo "Network might still be down,
pressing on"
+fi
+
 mountlate_start()
 {
     local err latefs
@@ -40,8 +47,8 @@
         ;;
     *)
         echo 'Mounting /etc/fstab filesystems failed,' \
-            ' startup aborted'
-        stop_boot true
+            ' startup continuing'
+        stop_boot false
         ;;
     esac

$ uname -a
FreeBSD host.domain.com 8.2-STABLE FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE #0: Thu May 26
18:53:04 CEST 2011     root at host.domain.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/TV  amd64
[built from RELENG_8 as of a few days ago]