Ethernet cable check

[blank]

Gérard Milmeister wrote:

>On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 12:58 +0100, Roman Maeder wrote:
>  
>
>>is there an official way to check for the presence of an ethernet cable for
>>an interface? If I config an interface with ONBOOT=yes but there is no cable
>>plugged in, it nevertheless configures the interface, which might later
>>startups such as sendmail waste a lot of time trying to access the
>>nonfunctional network. It also may keep default routes around that get in
>>the way if I later fire up the wireless interface. There is a program
>>mii-tool that can tell you whether the link is up:
>>    
>>
>
>Hallo rem,
>wie gehts?
>
>There is a package ifplugd available from freshrpms or dag ...
>This is a daemon that monitors an ethernet devices and calls ifup if
>e.g. a cable is plugged in and ifdown if the cable is unplugged.
>This works quite well on my notebook.
>
>Regards
>  
>
If i might ask a question :) i've been a linux user for a few years, and 
this thing you ask was a very frustrating thing for me when i started 
with linux around the same time i started opening PCs up and looking 
inside. i had old hardware (supported) and didn't know much about 
network cards. I found it very frustrating to have non-blinky network 
cards and not have ifconfig tell me which one had a "good physical link" 
when i was learning.

In the last week i've been pleasantly surprised when trying another open 
source os, that ifconfig very helpfully lets me know (by default) what 
interfaces have good physical connections. It's a small thing, but very 
helpful.

I know now that i could have looked at the tx/rx numbers in linux 
ifconfig and kinda put together my own picture, but i didn't what "all 
that stuff was for" - i was new to *nix in general (and network config 
gui's were uh, not so user friendly at the time).

Anyway question, why has this not been slipped into linux's ifconfig? Or 
is there something that i don't know about (very, very likely!) that 
makes this more trouble than it's worth to put in?

Just askin' aloud is all. "Write it in your own self," is an acceptable 
answer too - i need to make myself more useful :)

jb

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