Problem with very slow Bootup

It might happen that booting up the slug takes very long and you think your slug will never come up again anymore. Then, after 4 to 7 Minutes or so, suddenly HD-activity comes back and finally, the system is up again.

Apart from an ext3- filesystem-check, this might be also caused by calculating quota during startup.

1. Remove all quota in the web-interface.

2. Put a diversion-script called rc.quota in /unslung containing the following:

#!/bin/sh
exit 0

3. chmod the file to 755

4. try a reboot and hopefully enjoy!

Aparently, the solution above didn't solve my problem completely. There was a quick boot and then a couple of slow boots. Could not determine any logic behind it!

Today, I experimented a little bit on HDD spindown and added the following script ( originally found in SetSpinDownTimeOnMaxtorOneTouch, slightly changed) to /unslung/rc.local:

 
#!/bin/sh
# /unslung/rc.local
# A diversion script to remount the drive(s) without access
# times being recorded (the update of access times can
# prevent drives sleeping)

# Usually it is enough just to do /sda1 as this is the usually
# the one that holds the system.
/bin/echo "Remounting /dev/sda1 with noatime"
/bin/mount -o remount,rw,noatime /dev/sda1
/bin/echo  "Remounting /dev/sda2 with noatime"
/bin/mount -o remount,rw,noatime /dev/sda2

return 1
# EOF - include this line

This remounts all partitions on /dev/sda with the noatime-option.

Since I have this script running, there are no slow-boots anymore! Don't know why, but anyway - who cares, when it works!