You’re right: it’s announce-ip and another local script from /etc/network/if-up.d/ (I’m attaching it here) that both seem to trigger this if either is present. This other one’s sort of like the opposite of my announce-ip, there to update /etc/hosts with data from hosts elsewhere on the net my server knows about (that announce themselves with announce-ip). This combination used to work back with ifupdown alpha but now with beta causes the wait.

To clarify: with both scripts removed from if-up.d the 60+ second wait doesn’t appear during boot, but with either script in place the wait is there.

To be sure, I installed the latest ifupdown that’s just appeared in the repos (0.7~beta2ubuntu2) also, and there’s no change compared to 0.7~beta2ubuntu1 (wait is there when the scripts are there).

The question now becomes whether I’ve initially designed the scripts wrong with regards to how things in if-up.d should work, and it just happened to work with the alpha, or did something in ifupdown’s handling of if-up.d change between alpha and beta so that things that should work no longer do.

With my knowledge of things I’d bet on the former, but you can probably enlighten me on this. My assumption’s been that the scripts in if-up.d are run after network interfaces have been brought up.