Systemd waiting for external crypted disks...

I have an external, encrypted, disk that I periodically connect to the laptop. In order to have some easy to remember name, instead of UUID, I placed an entry in /etc/crypttab:

EXTDISK UUID=a809c218-f828-4149-bd9e-1c352a5f94df none

That way, when I connect disk, it will be automatically named EXTDISK and it will have an entry in /dev/mapper directory. Eventually, it will be mounted under /run/media/<userid>/EXTDISK. Note that there are only three fields in the line, each field separated from the other using space. The last field is passphrase placeholder, but I didn't want to have it written on the disk, so I used keyword none to signal that I want to type it each time the disk is opened.

The problem with this setup is that during  boot procedure, systemd waits for this disk to appear and, since there is no disk, it has to timeout. In system logs there will be messages like the following ones:

Dec 29 13:32:15 w530 systemd: Dependency failed for Cryptography Setup for EXTDISK.
Dec 29 13:32:15 w530 systemd: Dependency failed for dev-mapper-EXTDISK.device.
Dec 29 13:37:27 w530 systemd: Expecting device dev-mapper-EXTDISK.device...

The solution is simple. In newer versions of /etc/crypttab there is nofail option that should be added as a part of the fourth field. Note that, if there are multiple options in the fourth field, they all should be separated using commas and no spaces are allowed there. This option isn't listed in the manual page I linked in the introductory section of the post, so check your local manual page about crypttab.

As a side note, while searching for the solution of this timeout problem, I needed at one point to know which physical devices are beneath luks devices, i.e. my /dev/mapper directory looks like this:

# ls -l /dev/mapper/
total 0
crw-------. 1 root root 10, 236 Dec 29 13:27 control
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root       7 Dec 29 13:27 fedora-home -> ../dm-3
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root       7 Dec 29 13:27 fedora-root -> ../dm-2
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root       7 Dec 29 13:27 fedora-swap -> ../dm-1
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root       7 Dec 29 13:27 luks-a2c17ceb-222e-4cd2-3330-24a0a1111b43 -> ../dm-0
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root       7 Dec 29 13:27 luks-c7e8d2f7-1114-45c0-333b-fb8444222884 -> ../dm-4

What I was curious about are those two luks symlinks for which I didn't know their physical devices. It turned out its easy to find out, using cryptsetup tool:

# cryptsetup status luks-a2c17ceb-222e-4cd2-3330-24a0a1111b43
/dev/mapper/luks-a2c17ceb-222e-4cd2-3330-24a0a1111b43  is active and is in use.
  type:    LUKS1
  cipher:  aes-xts-plain64
  keysize: 512 bits
  device:  /dev/sda2
  offset:  4096 sectors
  size:    999184384 sectors
  mode:    read/write

So, there is an answer, /dev/sda2.