I just joined this list today, but I did look through the archive on the
Mandrake web site and didn't see anything related to the question I am
about to ask.  Please yell at me if this is a known issue.

I installed Mandrake 8.0 on my Thinkpad X21 a few days ago.  I used a
2.2 kernel for the installation, because of the trackpoint issue. 
Everything worked very well (including my cable modem which was
configured correctly during installation) and I was very happy. 
Yesterday I unplugged all of the wires from my computer (including the
ethernet cable from the modem) to do some computing outside.  The eth0
device failed to come up, which I expected, since the cable modem was
not plugged in.  However, when I went back inside and plugged everything
back in the eth0 device still wouldn't come up.

I tried rebooting into Windows 2000 (which is also installed on the
computer) and the ethernet didn't work there either.  I tried lots of
little futzing around in both Linux and Windows, but was unable to get
any network activity through the ethernet card.  I called AT&T@Home,
thinking that they might be able to help me, but no luck there. 
Finally, this morning I uninstalled the ethernet card, reinstalled it
and ran a bunch of diagnostic tests in Windows.  The card then started
working again in Windows and Linux.  So my best guess is that when I
booted Linux without the cable modem plugged in it flipped some bit on
the ethernet card that made it not work and when I ran the diagnostic
tests the bit got flipped back.

My question is, how can I avoid this annoyance in the future?  I would
like to use my laptop without the network cable from time to time.  I
have come up with two possibilities:
1) Find some automagic way (upgrading my kernel, etc.) of making the
problem disappear.
2) Set up Mandrake so that at boot time I can choose whether or not the
system should try to use the network.

Any help and/or advice is greatly appreciated.

Benjamin

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