Comment 35 for bug 1007293

I don't know whether a 'me too' comment is still relevant but I must add that in my network we experienced the almost exact same problem as Alex, with overall laggy, and only randomly successful reboots.
This randomness seemed to depend a bit on hardware, as certain groups of boxes of boxes would be more susceptible to it, but in the end it just reflects the race condition Steve described.

The problem was effectively solved by upgrading to 12.04 and patching /etc/init/portmap-wait.conf as per Steve's suggestion (#17). The problem could not be fixed on 11.10 as per the same patch, which I guess makes sense because NIS was not an upstart job back then.

Since all our NIS- and NFS-related lookups are done via hosts file I cannot comment on the subsequent problems Alex encountered.