Quick Ref: Linux Mint 11 #1
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» Pygick
I use Mandrake 9 on my laptop. The network card is configured to use DHCP to get network settings. Of late, I’ve been carrying this machine around and trying to work at places where there is no network. It takes a horribly long time to boot-up - it waits at activating eth0, waiting for DHCP. It is very simple to set a timeout for DHCP.
First, login as root. Then open /etc/sysconfig/network in any editor. Add a line as below:
DHCP_TIMEOUT=2
Now, it will wait only for 2 seconds for getting response from a DHCP server. After it boots up, when you later plugin a network connection, you can manually activate the network.
I do this by running /etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart as root. Don’t know if any GUI apps are available to do that.
In other distribitions, it might be something similar.
Yup, you can restart the network on a couple of ways through the Mandrake GUIs. Neither of them are very good though. You can.
From the Mandrake Control Centre 9.1 you can tell the network to disconnect and then reconnect. Why the button is marked disconnect when I haven't successfully connected yet I'm a little unsure. It's in the 'Network & Internet' section, drakNetwork.
OR
More generally useful, in Control Centre you can go to system->DrakServices and hit the 'Start' button to the right of network. It'll do pretty much exactly the same thing as the network restart in etc/init.d (i.e. restart if the network is up)