[ltp] fyi: booting without network

[D. Sen]

Thanks Robert. Thats a neat solution.

I guess a perfect solution is for a daemon which checks for network 
activity/electrical connection on the ethernet port in the background. 
This way it can call 'ifup ethX' when activity is detected. My typical 
usage profile involves connecting the laptop to a LAN at home and again 
a LAN at work. Right now, I have to manually ifup the ports at each 
location.

DS
Robert Andersson wrote:
> 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
> 



-- 
D. Sen, PhD
http://www.auditorymodels.org/~dsen



----- The Linux ThinkPad mailing list -----
The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
http://www.bm-soft.com/~bm/tp_mailing.html