[PLUG] Multiple network connections on a laptop

Terry Griffin griffint at pobox.com
Sun Feb 29 18:26:02 UTC 2004


On Sunday 29 February 2004 5:55 pm, Russ Johnson wrote:
> OK, I finally have a good setup working with my laptop. Mandrake 9.2
> with a 2.6.3 kernel. It runs sweetly.
>
> Now.. my problem.
>
> The built in nic is eth0, the wireless card comes up as eth1. Both work,
> but when I don't plug in a cable, it takes forever to boot because eth0
> has to timeout. Should I just assign an ip to get rid of the wait?
>
> If I have the wireless card in, it still tries to use eth0 as the
> default gateway, even when eth0 doesn't have a connection. I end up
> setting up a lot of the networking manually every time I boot my laptop.
>
> Is there a good reference anywhere that I can use on how to set this up
> to be a little more seemless?

Somewere I saw an announcement for some piece of software that
monitors a NIC for a cable being plugged or unplugged, and then performs
some defined action when one of these events happen. It was specifically
designed laptops with your sort of situation. I don't remember the project
name but you could probably find it by poking around on freshmeat.

So if you can find this software, I'd suggest configuring eth0 to not
initialize on boot and have this other piece of software take care of
bringing up the interface, but only if it finds that a cable is actually
plugged in.

The other option would be to modify the startup script to do interface
initialization in the background so it won't block the boot sequence.
This is how Knoppix deals with it.

Terry





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