[ltp] fyi: booting without network

[Robert Andersson]

hi all!

i have got some help in the past from this mailing list so maybe i can
contribute something. first, this is only for those bofhs out there
who have non-admin linux thinkpad users :)

here's the setup, i have something around 30 thinkpad t30s, t22s, and
t23s all of them dualbooting win2k and linux. running mandrake 8.1
works just fine, most of the time, but when booting without any
network it will take a long time for the eth0 to timeout, the mandrake
team is aware of this problem though it's not fixed yet. so meanwhile
i came up with an ad hoc solution --adding yet another boot
alternative in the bootloader, "linux, no net" for my users. i use
grub as a bootloader by the way.

as some of you already know, when passing boot prompt arguments of the
format key=value that by the kernel is not accepted as a setup
function will then become a environment variable. :)

so in my "linux, no net" boot option i will set bootwithoutnet=yes as
an extra option, this will look like this in my grub menu.lst file

 title linux, no net
 kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 devfs=mount quiet vga=788 bootwithoutnet=yes
 initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd.img

then in my /etc/init.d/network file i will check if the environment
variable bootwithoutnet is set to yes like this

 if [ "${bootwithoutnet}" = "yes" ]; then
	exit 0
 fi

that's it. :) i also wrote a small shellscripts netup and netdown that
brings up or down the net for my users using sudo...

yours,
/robert

-- 
Systems Administrator
Swedish National Graduate School of Language Technology

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