Ethwireck 1.2 review

Laptops which use dynamic IP address assignment via DHCP have the problem that the boot process is much longer when no wire is connec

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 47K Developer: Guido Socher

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Laptops which use dynamic IP address assignment via DHCP have the problem that the boot process is much longer when no wire is connected to the Ethernet card. This is because the startup scripts have to wait for the DHCP request to time out.

ethwireck can detect if the physical layer of the Ethernet is up. This can then be used in the init script for your network card to determine whether or not an interface should be brought up. In other words a timeout is avoided.

ethwireck is similar to mii-tool but it can work with more ethernet cards (not only drivers with an mii interface).


Note: I discovered recently that ethwireck does not work with all cards as expected. The problem seems to be that some cards support the interface but do not report the status as expected. I am currently invesitgating this problem. Wait for ethwireck-1.3.

To install it:
run
make
make install
or to not install to /usr/sbin/ethwireck but to /opt you can use
make PREFIX=/opt install

So far I have tested ethwireck only with 2.4.x Kernels. Probably
it will also work with 2.6.x Kernels but I have not used it
on a 2.6.x Kernel.