One server took over half an hour to boot, the second 45 minutes later still didn’t come up so I drove down to the co-lo facility and booted it.  It was running but just hadn’t completed the start-up.

     I’ve discovered several problems.  The new ntp daemon that “fixed” the security problems appears broken, at least systemd tries to start it unsuccessfully half a dozen times before it takes.  Each time involving a somewhat lengthy timeout.  I am guessing this may have to do with the reachability of servers but I really don’t know at this point.

     There is either a problem with my NIS configuration or ypbind doesn’t work correctly.  The behavior is not well documented in the manual pages.  It tells you what valid entries are but not what order you use them in.

     I have multiple servers configured as:

domain eskimo.com

ypserver (ip address)

ypserver (ip address)

     But rather than try each in order, it seems to try one and if that fails it gives up.  There seems to be no effective way to specify multiple servers except for broadcast and that has serious security issues.

     Then NFSv4, when an NFS server goes away and then comes back, NFS should recover automatically but it does only about 75% of the time.  In one instance, I had to restart the nfsd service on the server to get things to mount again.

     All these issues combined made for a lot of hair pulling.