The other side of the moon

Do you have multiple network interfaces on your linux box and find yourself needing to have not all of them active at bootup? Perhaps not all networks are connected and you don't want to waste time with attemtps at network negotiation for a connection you know isn't available.

I've faced this situation a couple of times, and came up with a way to tell my startup scripts to skip certain interfaces via kernel commandline parameters (which can be specified via your boot loader).

It's so simple that I often wonder why I (or anyone else) hadn't done it before. It's likely that everyone else on earth answered no to my question above.

Anyway, this is what I did:

In /etc/init.d/network, in the loop that iterates over $interfaces:

   # bring up all other interfaces configured to come up at boot time
   for i in $interfaces; do

after we've eliminated non-boot interfaces:

   if LANG=C egrep -L "^ONBOOT=['\"]?[Nn][Oo]['\"]?" ifcfg-$i > /dev/null ; then
      # this loads the module, to preserve ordering
      is_available $i
      continue
   fi

I add this:

   # If interface was disabled from kernel cmdline, ignore
   if cat /proc/cmdline | grep -q $i=off &>/dev/null; then
      continue;
   fi

Add the same for the next loop that iterates over $vlaninterfaces $bridgeinterfaces $xdslinterfaces $cipeinterfaces and you're done. As simple as that.

Now, when your boot loader pops the question, you choose to edit the kernel command line, and add something like eth0=off to prevent eth0 from coming up at boot time. You could turn this into an alternate boot config in grub by adding an entry in /boot/grub/grub.conf like this:

title Linux, skip eth1
 root (hd0,1)
 kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.10 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet eth1=off
 initrd /initrd-2.6.10.img

Which will give you a nice menu option below your default Linux option saying Linux, skip eth1.

You can always enable your interface later by doing /sbin/ifup eth1.

Note: You may need to add is_available $i inside the if block. I don't know, and it works for me without it.