Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 60936
excessive timeout when booting with disconnected ethernet
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:01 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011126 Netscape6/6.2.1 Description of problem: The Sony Vaio PCG-Z505HS has built in ethernet support. When travelling and booting without a wireline connection, the RH boot process takes an excessively long time to fail the eth0 interface (eepro100). A work-around is to use "neat" to disable "eth0" before going offline. Can't the eepro100 driver can immediately see that a LAN cable isn't plugged in to the ethernet socket on the notebook? If so that should be used to return an error code (and explanatory message?). Failing that, a shorter timeout period would be helpful. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Powerdown, disconnect ethernet cable, then reboot Actual Results: Boot process waits a very long time before deciding to fail the eth0 interface Expected Results: Boot process should be able to tell immediately that there is no LAN cable plugged in, and to then disable the eth0 interface. If this can't be reliably detected, then a shorter time out period would make life much better for road warriors. Additional info:
We don't know if there is a cable plugged in, and afaik there isn't any way to find out. You can change the timeout for your machine by editing /etc/sysconfig/ifcfg-eth0 and adding a line that says DHCPCDARGS="-t 20" where 20 is whatever timeout you wish to use, in seconds. Hope this helps.