I'm already doing the start on starting mountall, but while the job is copying the directory some other jobs are processing. I don't know why, but when I do that the system simply stops (possibly triggers a deadlock) and after 2 minutes it says that the task modprobe is not responding for 120 seconds. I figured that this task might be the module-init-tools, so I did: start on (starting mountall or starting module-init-tools) With that the system stops locking, but strangely my job runs twice. Is that expected? <div class="gmail_quote">2012/5/10 James Hunt <<a href="mailto:james.hunt@ubuntu.com" target="_blank">james.hunt@ubuntu.com</a>> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> <div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5">On 10/05/12 14:25, Rogerio Vinhal Nunes wrote: > Hi, I'm trying to make a diskless client with an Ubuntu image booting from a read-only common root > folder. > > To do so, we usually mount the /var partition in memory and populates it with the read-only content > so the services would work. But this seems to be causing some problems due to the copy process > taking some time while the other jobs are running. > > Is there a way to run a job before everyone else or making a job to stall all other processes until > it finishes? Without upstart we did this in the rc.sysinit script that executed before the init scripts. > > At least an option to make part of the job synchronized would be nice. > > </div></div>Rogerio, If you haven't already done so, I recommend reading the Upstart Cookbook [1]. For the scenario you describe you can create a job that specifies a 'start on' condition of: start on starting mountall That job can mount /var and perform the copy. Crucially, the mountall job will: - not run until your /var copy job has finished. - will not mount /var itself in this scenario since will already be mounted. This works because the 'starting' event is a "hook" which blocks. See: - <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#event-types" target="_blank">http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#event-types</a> - upstart-events(7) or <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#ubuntu-well-known-events-ubuntu-specific" target="_blank">http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#ubuntu-well-known-events-ubuntu-specific</a> Kind regards, James. [1] - <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/" target="_blank">http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/</a> -- James Hunt ____________________________________ <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook" target="_blank">http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook</a> <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/upstart_cookbook.pdf" target="_blank">http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/upstart_cookbook.pdf</a> </blockquote></div>