Very long startup when no network

[techmum]

I am new to Linux and trying FC4 on dual-boot work notebook PC. However in order to work on company LAN, it has to use fixed IP address in 10.0.0.x range.

Problems -

a. When I am not connected to LAN the notebook can take up to 15 minutes to boot up. It just sits showing setting up Swap File for ages.

b. Similar situation when I connect to another LAN that uses a different IP range such as 192.168.1.x

How do I get it to boot up quickly either when I not connected to a LAN or to a LAN with different address range?

ta

[w5set]

you could keep the network from starting at boot
chkconfig --levels 2345 network off
and then use the network config app
system-config-network
to make different "Profiles" for the same card and activate whichever one you needed to hookup to
service network start
kind of round about but should work for you...

[tomcat]

When the bootprocess reaches the part where it searches for your network-connection, press ctrl+c in order to bypass the network activation.

[grayeul]

Two things I have found that help: 1) Ensure you have a domain name in your /etc/hosts file for localhost. i.e.:

127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain

Also, removing entirely /etc/resolv.conf prevents attempts to get DNS info. It should get automatically created by dhcp client if that succeeds (i.e. you are on a network).

[wdingus]

Yes but the original poster mentioned a static IP, not DHCP..

The problem is most likely your DNS configuration. You may have set this with a graphical admin app but under the surface the contents of the /etc/resolv.conf point to the DNS server your computer will use to resolve names/numbers. The boot delay is various things starting up which want to access host names your local machine doesn't know and for which it has to refer to a DNS server. Unplugged yours isn't reachable and it has to "time out" on each attempt.

As someone else mentioned, RedHat/Fedora like to put your system name and localhost all as one entry in /etc/hosts, something like this:

127.0.0.1 mycomputername localhost.localdomain localhost

I like to keep only localhost on the loopback interface and the system name on it's real IP, something like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.0.1 mycomputername mycomputername.mydomain.com

You might additionally have some success with configuring DNS server (bind) on your own machine there and pointing DNS queries to yourself. Whether the cable is plugged in or not, 127.0.0.1 will be available. On top of that, you can setup forwarders so that hosts your own box doesn't know how to resolve it forwards on to your companies DNS server, some info after a quick search:
http://www.wwnet.net/~stevelim/dns.html

Good luck, I'm one of 2 people at my place of employment now running FC4 desktop machines entirely and so far with great success.


PS. If your company has a DHCP server configured and you could use DHCP instead of a static IP that might resolve much of this. The DNS server entries in /etc/resolv.conf would dynamically be setup by DHCP upon each boot.

[techmum]

thanks all

I'll try these suggestions over the next few days

[techmum]

I discovered that the major problem was ntpd

By stopping ntpd from starting the startup time of my notebook has gone from 10 to 15 minutes to around 2 minutes when I don't have a LAN connection.

A secondary problem I had > several GNOME applets were regularly crashing when no network was present. The two major culprits were the Weather applet and the Network Connection status applet. However, based on some info I saw elsewhere, I set both NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher to start automatically. Since I have done this, on numerous tests without a LAN connection, no applet has crashed.

However, I really would like to try two other things >

a. By default, ntpd starts quite early, but I would like to get ntpd to start after NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher to see if they are smart enough to also solve the ntpd problem. However I understand I have to change a link file in /etc/rc.d/rc5.d
Any help on the best way to do that would be welcome

b. second question, is there a way to set the ntpd timeout so that if it doesn't find any ntp servers within 30 seconds for example, it just fails and moves on?

ta

[jowah]

As others have hinted at, I suggest you look into using network configuration profiles and set up three profiles for when you are using

• No network
• The company LAN (10.x.x.x)
• The other LAN (192.168.x.x)

Then you set up three GRUB entries using the netprofile=<profilename> option so you can select which profile to use when the computer starts.

The RHEL System Administraton Guide has a section on this: Working with profiles.

However, with the recent introduction of the NetworkManager application, perhaps that can be used to sort things out for you too, and it looks like that's what you're currently using and that the ntpd problem is all that remains, so YMMV.

[techmum]

thanks jowah. that's a really good suggestion