Description of problem: I have a laptop with a wired Ethernet adapter and no wireless card (I have a wireless card, but this problem occurs when there is no network connection, wired or wireless). When booting with the Ethernet cable disconnected, booting is intolerably slow. (In particular, it hangs for a very long time for most network operations, particularly sendmail startup, but also in many other places). This problem doesn't go away until I reconfigure the BIOS so the Ethernet adapter is invisible to the OS. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Configure RH9 system with wired Ethernet adapeter. 2. Boot system with no cable attached to Ethernet card 3. Actual results: Very very slow boot, hangs in many places, and still slow even after boot. Expected results: If the cable is disconnected the system should act the same as if there is no Ethernet card attached. At the very least the timeouts should be shorter. Additional info: My Ethernet adapter is the one built into the Dell Inspiron 8200, a 3Com 3C5x9 I believe.
That is also pretty much to be expected. Simply unplugging your network cable doesn't disable the networking in Linux so it will try to resolve names, make connections etc, and without a network connection this will take time to timeout. Imagine you would have just a bad network connection, you still would want to the network to operate, right? So the timeouts are there for a good reason. If you want to disable networking, then do so buy booting in runlevel 2 or by disabling the interfaces during bootup. Read ya, Phil