How to disable eth1 (wireless nic card) at startup?
 

Hello,

I have an IBM T40 with a wireless nic card (which I've never used under Linux) running RHEL 3.0. I just recently upgraded my kernel to 2.4.21-20 and in general everything works fine. However, one affect of the upgrade seems to be that support was added for the wireless nic. The problem with this is that when I boot the machine I have to wait a considerable amount of time while it tries to bring up eth1 (which I'm assuming is the wireless card). The process invariably fails because there is no signal. The delay each time I reboot has started to annoy me. How can I disable eth1? I though chkconfig would be the answer but it seems it's not a service. Help!

Another quick (mostly unrelated) question. I've been poking around the /etc/rc stuff and I think that I have the general idea which is that the files in each directory determine which services to start at the corresponding runlevel. I gather that if the symlink starts with 'S' the service is active at the runlevel and if it starts with 'K' the service is not. But what do the numbers mean? For instance in /etc/rc.d/rc5.d I find the file 'S90xfs' I assume that this means that xfs should be started when the machine enters runlevel 5 but what does the '90' mean? If anyone can point me to any documentation which describes this whole system that would be great.

Thanks in advance for any replies!

-exits

Regarding disabling eth1, I'm sure Red Hat has a graphical section about network cards (I know Mandrake does as I have done it myself!). You should be able to disable it from there if you can find it.

If you are running X:
http://elibrary.fultus.com/technical...-ethernet.html

Otherwise I think this might be the text interface but I'm not sure:
system-config-network-tui


About the RC directories.

S scripts:
The S scripts mean they will be started at that runlevel.

K scripts:
These scripts run when you shutdown your computer.

The numbers are just the order in which the startup and kill scripts run. So a script with a lower number will run before a scripts with a higher number. For instance you want to up your iptables before you startup the rest of your networking. And vice versa, shutdown the networking services before shutting down your iptables.

To read more about the booting proces:
http://elibrary.fultus.com/technical...down-sysv.html

Peter

Thanks Peter, your reply was a big help. The fultus links especially are helpful; that's a great site!

-exits

The GUI tools are easy enough to use, but I've always found editing text files directly to be the quickest way. RHEL is probably the same as Fedora. For Fedora, what I would do is edit the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1, and where it says ONBOOT=yes, change it to no. Of course, you have to be root to edit this file.