SLOW portmapper startup (when using NIS)

[Toralf Lund]

A problem with all our Red Hat/Fedora setups:

Boot delays for a loooong time at this stage:

Starting portmapper:

I suspect this is related to the fact that we have

passwd:     nis files

in /etc/nsswitch.conf. I may seem like the portmapper tries very hard 
for a long time to lookup info on some user in NIS, which won't work, of 
course, since ypbind isn't started yet. And there is no way it could be 
(I mean, if you wanted to cheat and change the sequence), since ypbind 
actually requires the portmapper (as far as I know.)

We discovered this several versions ago, but I believe it's still there 
in FC3.

Can anyone give me more details on what is happening here? What exactly 
would the portmapper be looking for? And why does it take so long? Why 
doesn't the NIS lookup (if that's what it is) just fail with no delay? 
Any way around the problem?

- Toralf