Bringing the Ethernet Interface Down for a While

[Martin G. McCormick]

	I am using Debian Linux on a system connected to DSL.
I recently had the idea of temporarily taking the
Ethernet connection down for periods of time when network access is not
needed.  One could use cron or at to do the ifconfig eth0 down at
one time and then bring it back up with ifconfig eth0 up at some
other time.

	What happens is that the ifconfig eth0 down and ifconfig
eth0 up commands both work normally but the system can't seem to connect
to remote hosts after the interface comes back up.  Attempts to
use ssh get the "name or service not available." error messages
and attempts to ping remote hosts give a "network is unreachable"
error.

	What else should I be looking at to restore
functionality?

	This isn't an urgent situation, but my curiosity is up
now since everything looks good but something doesn't return to
normal when the Ethernet interface is brought back up.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Network Operations Group