When I said in my previous post that the Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade went fine, I spoke too soon……

It seems that the normal Sys-V init system has been replaced by upstart, which is Ubuntu’s attempt at speeding up the boot process by initialising services in parallel. The result being, that /etc/rc.local is no longer the last script to run, and the init scripts are pretty much run in random order, causing all sorts of race conditions. There’s naff all documentation on writing upstart scripts either.

So I’ve moved mounting of encrypted partitions from a nice safe script in /etc/rc.local to adding the entries in /etc/fstab and hoping that device-mapper initialises before fsmount. It also means that fsck has to be turned off (for just those partitions) otherwise the boot process may halt. Luckily services like NFS are started after the mounting is done, or they’d probably fail too. I really can’t see the logic – knocking 10secs of a boot process and screwing up a UNIX standard that has worked since the 1970’s! I thought that kind of crap was limited to the Fedora or Gnome-devs.

I did however upgrade my Fedora 10 machine to F12 without issue (so far – I won’t tempt fate again!) other than a few things I’ve got to recompile like hydra, medusa, amap, john etc.

I saw my first “watch this on ITV1-HD” message tonight, so pressed the red button to watch Law & Order UK in 1080i goodness! I’ve been watching BBC-HD for a while, but ITV’s offerings are pretty few and far between.