I currently have a number of NFS shares on a remote server (mounted via fstab). The server isn't always online and recently (seemingly following an update) the boot process on my local machine grinds to a halt when trying to mount these shares with the server offline. I get a number of "No route to host" errors which seriously slows things down before the boot process continues normally.

Is there anything I can do to get it just to quickly overlook these?

Also, if the server is turned off while my PC has these shares mounted it 'locks up'. The KDE Kicker becomes completely unresponsive and the shutdown process will hang (apparently at the 'shutting down sound device' entry).

Any ideas?