The ONBOOT="no" option appears to be ignored for eth0 NICs which are pcmcia adapters. The init scripts seem to ignore the eth0 interface however the Red Hat pcmcia script /etc/pcmcia/network goes ahead and brings it up anyway if the card is found in the socket at boot. ONBOOT does seem to work for ppp0 where /dev/ttyS1 is a pcmcia modem in slot 0. When ONBOOT="no" in ifcfg-ppp0 the device does not attempt to start up even if it is in the slot at boot. Laptop is an IBM Thinkpad T20 running Red Hat Wolverine (7.1 RC1) and the stock initscripts / kernel / pcmcia packages.
This is normal behavior for PCMCIA/cardbus NICs.
How exactly is this normal behavior? If an interface is set to be ONBOOT="n" it's expected that during boot that it won't come up. The reason this happens in the first place is because of the custom Red Hat / network script integration going on in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts and /etc/pcmcia. Before closing this as "not a bug" I think it needs more consideration. The real soluton is better Red Hat / pcmcia integration. A hack job would be to document that this is a problem and in the netcfg control panel make this option unavailable if the interfaces is a pcmcia nick. (Possibly check /var/pcmcia/stab for info?) While we're at it, why is it that networking starts before pcmcia services in the first place? This seems to be a Red Hat only thing, but I could be wrong. So can we please make /etc/pcmcia/network parse the /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts/ifcfg-if0 scripts instead of blindly bringing up the interface?
It's normal behavior in that that's the way it's always been. It's also the behavior you'll get from hotplug when that is used for cardbus or pcmcia interfaces. In any case, this is not an initscripts problem.
I do not expect this to be changed for this release.