I think I am running Gentoo though I have a vanilla kernel.

Whenever I boot up my computer, it starts ath0 and eth0 (the wireless card and the ethernet interface). How do I stop the eth0 from starting? Basically I want to do "ifconfig eth0 down" at boot before it starts connecting to anything automatically. I tried rc-update del net.eth0 default or whatever, and there are no net eth0 files in /etc/conf.d. I dunno about the files in /etc/init.d/net.ath0 and /etc/init.d/net.eth0 and /etc/init.d/net.lo. Those are pretty long files. But I want to keep the ath0 up.

So, how would I go about doing this?

Thanks in advance.

Never used Gentoo, but you can either remove/disable the service or edit the network interfaces file and comment out the eth0

With redhat, you could disable service by:
Also in RedHat, when you boot you can press 'I' for interactive start up where YOU call the shots on what to start and what not to start.

On ubuntu, you could just edit

I don't want to disable all the services. I just want eth0 out but ath0 on. The Network interface files are all empty. I built from the raw vanilla kernel up, so there is nothing on the files.

If I had to press "I" during bootup, that wouldn't make it automatic, now would it I want it configured so that I don't HAVE to do anything, and all the services I want start up.

With all due respect...no flaming from me. If YOU no longer need the Eth0 setup,...remove the Ethernet Card from the system. Seriously,...if YOU'RE not going to use it again, for a while.