DHCP eth0 question

I have a similar situation on my Debian laptop, so the fix I use for that should work on a Pi too.

I installed mii-tool, which can report details of the port status. Then I changed my /etc/network/interfaces to read something like:

iface eth0 inet dhcp pre-up ( mii-tool eth0 | grep -q "link ok" )

What this does is to check that eth0 has a link before trying to start the interface. If it doesn't then the pre-up command will return false and networking won't try and bring the interface up.

Hope that helps.

Thanks -that looks useful. Will try next time I am playing.

Seems mii-tool has been superseded, for some years, by ethtool - does the same job here. Thanks.

Afraid not - putting the pre-up line in results in no interface on the pi getting an IP with either cable or WIFI. I tried changing the order the interfaces were defined in but it made no difference.

ethtool does not output "link ok". Did you change the grep argument to something like "Link detected: yes" ?

Cheers.

Jim

I am not *that* dim Jim :-) But a valid point in that I had not posted the actual text used. I checked it out form the command line to see what I needed to grep for. Especially as I was using a different tool. But the Pi does not seem to like a pre-up - even though it is in the man page. :-)

Well, I'm glad you put the smiley at the end there.

Too bad.

I hope you find some solution.

Jim

ISTR having issues with bringing networks up at some point when things 'changed' from the old way to a new way.

Somewhere around kernel 3.0

this may help

More than I ever wanted to know :-) Thanks.