I've seen this a lot on Fedora..the boot stops for a LONG time on things like "Getting IP information for eth0" and "Mounting NFS filesystems:". Now there may be things like the ethernet cable not connected for the former, and the NFS server down for the latter. Isn't there a way of setting a timeout value for these actions, instead of waiting eons for the service to convince itself that these actions will fail?

I work around these by booting in single user mode and changing stuff in /etc, but i'd be really grateful if someone told me how to set a timeout for stuff like this.

TIA,
Mayank

Are these remote filesystems used for system directories your system needs to operate, or could the system run without them? Read through the mount and nfs and mount.nfs manpages. There is a generic _netdev mount option you can use for nfs and samba shares. This will defer mounting these shares in the background until the network is ready.
You can mount all shares with the _netdev option with the command "mount -a -o _netdev.

Also look at the soft and bg options if they exist.

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