Ethwireck 1.2

Ethwireck - Check if the wire in the Ethernet port is live.

Laptops which use dynamic IP address assignment via DHCP have the problem that the boot process is much longer when no wire is connected to the Ethernet card. This is because the startup scripts have to wait for the DHCP request to time out.

ethwireck can detect if the physical layer of the Ethernet is up. This can then be used in the init script for your network card to determine whether or not an interface should be brought up. In other words a timeout is avoided.

ethwireck is similar to mii-tool but it can handle more ethernet cards (not only drivers with an mii interface).