ntpdate and network interfaces

[Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy]

I am looking at this list (and forums) and I see a lot of people
complaining about dhclient trying to aquire a non-existing DHCP server,
and ntpdate taking a long time to timeout if an interface is up but not
configured (or doesn't have internet access). I wonder if a possible
solution would be to make time synchronisation at startup optional
(after all, there is an option to synch with an NTP server in the Time
and Date applet). Also I was wondering if there are any other processes
dependent on the network that start by default. If not, we could modify
ifup scripts to start dhclient in the background, sleep for a few
seconds just to give it a chance to aquire DHCP server if one is readily
available and proceed as usual. The problem I am trying to address here
is the behavior of dhclient which sends a lot of consequitive DHCP
request packets increasing timeout value after each one, which results
in a considerable pause if the server is just not there.