is there an official way to check for the presence of an ethernet cable for an interface? If I config an interface with ONBOOT=yes but there is no cable plugged in, it nevertheless configures the interface, which might later startups such as sendmail waste a lot of time trying to access the nonfunctional network. It also may keep default routes around that get in the way if I later fire up the wireless interface. There is a program mii-tool that can tell you whether the link is up: csh> mii-tool eth0 eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD flow-control, link ok so I tried to use this. Here's the hack I am using now (on an Asus M68Ne). My ifcfg-eth0 looks like this (in part) DEVICE=eth0 BOOTPROTO=none IPADDR=192.168.100.51 TYPE=Ethernet USERCTL=no ONBOOT=`if mii-tool $DEVICE | egrep -q 'link ok' ; then echo yes ; else echo no; fi` inside ifup, this file is sourced, so all is well. However, inside init.d/network there is some trickery; these ifcfg-* files are not sourced, but it attempts to parse them. This made my first attempt fail: if mii-tool eth0 | egrep -q 'link ok' ; then ONBOOT=yes else ONBOOT=no fi init.d/network greps for "ONBOOT=no" and if it finds it, skips the interface. My new version no longer contains this substring, so it seems to work, but I wonder whether there isn't a more standard solution. Roman Maeder -- The most aptly named computer book: "Windows for Dummies"
