Slow laptop network startup (Re: [Techtalk] NFS)

[Mary]

On Wed, Feb 05, 2003, Conor Daly wrote:
> Is the ip address assigned by DHCP or hard coded?  If it's DHCP, that
> will also contribute to the boot delay.  If you _do_ use DHCP, you can
> set the interface to _not_ come up at boot time and manually start it
> when at home.  If you add the following line to
> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
> 
> USERCTL="yes"
> 
> then a non-root user can do 
> 
> /sbin/ifup eth0

Alternatively, you can specify a lower DHCP timeout - I believe the
timeout is normally a minute. It doesn't seem to cause too many problems
if you lower it to 5 seconds or so.

http://gspot.puzzling.org/tech/n160.html describes how to do this using
Mandrake 8.2 (near the bottom), in other distros the script that starts
DHCP might be in other places.

-Mary