I have a number of little slave (HTTP) servers, all of whom use NFS shares for everything so that I don't have to synchronize their little hard drives. Many things upon which Apache (and so on) depends are on those shares.

I'd like to make sure that systemd will start the NFS-client daemon, and wait for it to initialize, before proceeding with additional steps such as mounting the shares or starting Apache.

I know that systemd has a good dependencies-system (yay!!), including the ability to wait for things, but I've never really fiddled with it too much. Any pointers?

Have you considered a different approach where you change any startup scripts for service that require the NFS shares to check that they are available before starting the service and do this on a script by script basis rather than a dependencies basis.

If you have the checks on a service by service level then when you start/restart a service your checks can run and ensure the NFS share is there rather than looking at a previous "well it started on boot" style dependency "flag".

You could modify the systemd unit for apache to start after nfs:

/usr/lib/systemd/system/httpd.service

Unit]
Description=The Apache HTTP Server
After=network.target remote-fs.target nss-lookup.target nfs-mountd.service

Yep, I think that After= is what I was "after."

What I am looking for is the ability to make sure that systemd will not attempt to start certain services (Apache, DNSMasq, etc.) until "after" the NFS service has been fully started. This should do nicely.

Ahh... "inittabs and crontabs." No, I don't miss them at all . . .

https://www.freedesktop.org/software...temd.unit.html

Good resource. You can also do the opposite - go to the nfs service and throw a 'Before=apache' or whatever in it.