Many of my systems use DHCP for obtaining IP addresses. Even though they all receive a static IP address, it allows me to have them moved over (migrations), use TFTP boot, cloning (in case of quick testing), etc. But one of the things that was making my efforts somewhat more difficult was that the dhcpcd service continued (the dhcpcd daemon immediately went in the background) even though no IP address was received yet. Subsequent service scripts that required a working network connection failed to start then.

The solution is to configure dhcpcd to wait for an IP address. This is done through the -w option, or the waitip instruction in the dhcpcd.conf file. With that in place, the service script now waits until an IP address is assigned.