> I have a few things that mount remote file stores and these mounts usually fail upon boot due to the speed at which certain devices boot up - and I've decided not to solve that yet
If your OS is using systemd, you can fix that pretty easily by adding an After=network-online.target (so the ExecStart doesn't even try to check if there is no networking yet) and an ExecCondition shell script [1] to actually check if nfs / smb on the target host is alive as an override to the fs mounts.
Add a bunch of BindsTo overrides to the mounts and the services that need the data, and you have yourself a way to stop the services automatically when the filesystem goes away.
I've long been in the systemd hater camp, but honestly, not having to wrangle with once-a-minute cronjobs to check for issues is actually worth it.
[1] https://forum.manjaro.org/t/for-those-who-use-systemd-servic...
Here's a deeper article on ordering things around network startup: https://systemd.io/NETWORK_ONLINE/
It doesn't conflict with anything you've said, just a very handy document.
You can also use _netdev in the mount options, then systemd mount generator will generate the dependency on network automatically.
You can also use RequiresMountsFor to mark a mount (directory) as a hard dependency for the unit.