# How to prevent attempts to start an ethernet port? [SOLVED]

## dufeu

I have a bit of a strange situation.

I have a Dell laptop circa 2001. It has a built in 3COM NIC. At one point, the laptop was dropped on the corner where the NIC port is located and it will no longer make a working connection. To get around this, I've plugged in a PC Card with a Realtek 8139 based NIC.

I've deleted /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net* to allow udev to reset the NIC numbering.

The PC Card 8139 NIC comes up as eth0 (which is what I want) while the 3COM NIC comes up as eth1 (which I don't care about).

I cannot disable the built in NIC because that is not an available option in the BIOS. And yes, I have the last available BIOS installed.

The annoyance is that the boot process tries to use dhcpcd to obtain an IP address for eth1 three different times. Naturally, because no carrier is ever available, it times out and fails each time.

Please note that starting eth1 is NOT part of rc-update.

How do I tell/where do I set the boot process to not attempt to start eth1?

As a work around, I've modified /etc/rc.conf to add

```
rc_depend_strict="NO"
```

 so that all the 'net' depending services start.

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## nativemad

Hi, 

you can just put the following in /etc/conf.d/net to not assign an ip and let the service start...   :Wink: 

```

config_eth1=( "null" )
```

Cheers

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## dufeu

 *nativemad wrote:*   

> you can just put the following in /etc/conf.d/net to not assign an ip and let the service start...  
> 
> ```
> 
> config_eth1=( "null" )
> ...

 Dang!

It worked!

I had tried commenting out the config_eth1 line but that hadn't done it. Thanks for the tip!  :Very Happy:   :Very Happy: 

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