Need advice on how to manually configure a network connection
 

I am running Ubuntu 12.04, and I have removed the network manager to deal with a problem that I talked about in this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...on-4175416299/

Indeed, removing the network manager seems to have solved the problem except that now I have a new problem. At boot, the system spends about two minutes "Waiting on network configuration" and then proceeds to boot without a network configuration.

My question is: How do I manually configure my network so as to remove this downtime at boot while the system is waiting for a configuration? And in general, are there any resources that describe how to manually configure a network? My "network" is quite simple at the present time. It's a dial-up ppp connection. The dial-up part works fine (I'm using it now). I just want the system to know that it should look to the dial-up connection for network access, and as I mentioned, I'd like to remove that wait time at boot.

By the way, my computer has both a wired ethernet adapter and a Wi-Fi adapter, but I am not using them at present.

Perhaps have a look in /etc/network/interfaces and comment out any sections that start with 'auto'?

Thanks. I will do that. But I heard that there could be trouble booting Linux at all if I comment out the loopback section. Is that true?

This is on a laptop, and 75% of the time I'm not connected to any network at all so I don't really need it to bring the network up at boot.

No, don't comment out the loopback.
I wonder if your interfaces are timing out waiting for dhcp.

---------- Post added 07-15-12 at 11:09 PM ----------

No, don't comment out the loopback.
I wonder if your interfaces are timing out waiting for dhcp.

No, don't comment out the loopback.
I wonder if your interfaces are timing out waiting for dhcp.

Thanks, I will not comment out the loopback.

The more I research this, the more I am convinced that this is some Ubuntu craziness. Apparently, they have scripts to bring up the network and to configure network devices independent of the interfaces file. At least, that is what I believe at this point.

One of their scripts is called /etc/init/failsafe.conf which imposes a wait of up to 2 minutes when the system cannot get the network configuration immediately. I have eliminated that wait by editing that file and the system boots normally except for the fact that it boots without a network configuration.