From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/8.51 [en] (X12; U; Linux 5.2.12-4 i986) Description of problem: With PCI/ISA network cards, you can control if you want the device activated (via ifup) at boot time. This was also true with PCMCIA cards with all Red Hat versions through 7.0. Now with 7.1, PCMCIA cards are always "ifup'd" at boot time. This lack of control, feature removal, and behavior change is annoying on many levels. Real world example: My laptop gets plugged into many different networks. Those networks may or may not being using DHCP, those networks are often using the "same" private RFC1918 address space. I don't want my ethernet card coming up automatically and potentially causing the network grief. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Turn on laptop that has PCMCIA ethernet 2. The card will be "ifup'd" during the boot up process Additional info: Previously PCI, ISA, and PCMCIA ethernet devices all respected the value "ONBOOT" in a /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX file. This was a good thing. Now PCMCIA ethernet devices ignore "ONBOOT". The logical thing to do would be to restore PCMCIA's respect for that option, because as much as possible ethernet devices should be configured and treated the same regardless of how they are attached. One other related question remains, and that is what should happen when you insert the card after the system has booted? For the ultimate in control, you could seperate and configure "boot time" and "after boot you insert card" each independently. I would argue against this. I think both cases should be treated the same.
I agree that if the card is plugged in before booting, it should honor the ONBOOT. I will try to figure a way on how to do this, the tricky part indeed is what to do when someone inserts a card later on. Currently, it's hard to make a distinction between those events (the on boot case pretends to be a card insertion)
The confounding of boot and card insertion doesn't seem to me to be such a bad thing. If ONBOOT=no, then booting or inserting the card doesn't start the interface and it has to be started manually. If ONBOOT=yes, then booting or inserting the card starts the interface automatically. This seems less annoying to me (with a laptop that may not be connected to a network at boot or card insertion) than having no control whatsoever. Consider the following example: You have a modem/ethernet combo card. You insert it to use the modem. Under the current regime, the ether interface will attempt to start even if not connected. In my case, I have a built-in ethernet and a pc-card wireless. The wireless interface always attempts to start on boot, even if the ethernet is connected. If I'm near my WAP, then I end up with both interfaces running, when I may really only want the (faster) ethernet.
BTW, this is still the behavior in 7.3. Can the version number be updated somehow?
Just saw the update to 7.3. FYI, it happens in 8.0 too.