Timeouts when starting network connections and mounting shares

[Ron Yorston]

Per-Olof Litby wrote:
>When Fedora boots and attempts to start  network connections, it waits 
>for a very long time before it decides that the connection has failed, 
>for instance if the etherner port is disconnected. This makes for an 
>annoyingly long boot time when I'm not connected to a network.

Yes, this is an annoyance, particularly for laptop machines that are
sometimes connected and sometimes not.

I use ifplugd:

   http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/ifplugd/

This is a daemon which monitors the ethernet interface to see if a
network is present.  If it is it runs ifup to bring the interface up,
and if the connection goes away it brings the interface down.  Set
ONBOOT=no for the interface and run ifplugd at boot time to control
it instead.

To build ifplugd you need libdaemon by the same author.  An alternative
is netplug:

   http://www.red-bean.com/~bos/

>Same thing a little later when it tries to mount SMB shares from fstab. 
>Takes forever before it times out.

I don't use SMB shares so I can't comment on that.

Ron