Quick question: is there any way to check whether or not a cable is plugged in to the NIC? (I'm thinking through the /sys or /proc filesystems...)

Reason being, my laptop is sometimes connected to my home network, sometimes not. I'd like it to check on bootup whether it's physically connected to anything before bringing up the interface and mounting SMB shares.

As it stands, I either have to manually tell it to mount shares, or wait for it to time out during startup if I'm not connected. (takes a long time)


Oh yeah, 2.6.8 kernel, e100 driver as a module.

You could try "ifconfig" as root. It should give you some output on your network interfaces. I don't know how descriptive it is, as my net card is wireless, and it's status command is different.