What is hanging systemctl?

[Tom Horsley]

On Mon, 19 Oct 2015 09:53:38 -0700
Gordon Messmer wrote:

> That means that even when 
> the user is in the local files, the network identity systems are queried 
> for group memberships, and that will hang.

But why would it hang? The server wasn't just having trouble,
it was completely offline. Shouldn't something have noticed it
was utterly impossible to talk to the server and fallen back to
local lookups (certainly absolutely all of the "system" users
are locally defined - NIS is used only for "normal" users
and ssh login type stuff).