Very slow bringing up network devices when network absent

Reformist · Guru Joined: 06 Oct 2002 Posts: 323

I have a laptop with wireless ethernet (this problem also applies to regular ethernet connections). I have the wlan service set to start up upon boot. When I boot and am not connected to a network, the stage of "bringing up wlan0" (or eth0) just sits there, for about 2 minutes, until it finally fails.

This is out of wack, especially for laptops, which you would want the system to pick up an existing network automatically upon boot, and yet also boot quickly when a network isn't present.

Is there any way to set a timeout for the network script somewhere, or somehow start this service in parallel so that if it takes a long time realizing nothing is there, the system will still be accessible (i.e. quickly show a login prompt)?
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KingTaco · Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 3:40 am Post subject:

are you using dhcp? if so, it can take up to two minutes to wait for dhcp to timeout.
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sparks · Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 4:43 am Post subject:

the only way that I have figured out how to bypass this on my laptop is to not add wlan0 to any runlevel. I just do an /etc/init.d/wlan0 start after I have set my ssid/wep and such.
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waydaws · Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 6:21 am Post subject:

How about setting up grub or lilo to boot with a Network and No Network setting. You boot with a variable set up, and the kernal passes it to the init scripts?

I saw this somewhere where they set up a shell variable called PROFILE. Let me see if I can find it again...

Right, this is it: http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue20/laptop.html

ezman · Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 4:09 pm Post subject:

I assume you are using dhcp;

from `man dhcpcd`