I hope the problem is solved now. In the next fai version only active network devices are used for bootpc or dhcp queries. These are devices which are configured to be running and have a valid IP address. This list can be overwritten using the variable $netdevices. By now you can also change the variable $timeout (in fai.conf) to decrease the timeout for a bootpc call, which is default to 30 seconds.
rcS_fai: timeout=30 # bootpc timeout I hope this works for all of you. Here are the details how this is implemented. cvs diff: Diffing . Index: subroutines =================================================================== RCS file: /home/lange/.cvs_repository/debian/fai/lib/subroutines,v retrieving revision 1.62 diff -r1.62 subroutines 48a49,50 > # devices that are running > netdevices_up=`ifconfig | perl -anF'\s+' -e 'print "$F[0]\n" if $F[0];' | grep >-v "^lo"` 51c53,55 < [ -n "$netdevices" ] || netdevices=`dmesg|grep "^eth.: "| awk -F: '{print $1}'|sort|uniq` --- > [ -n "$netdevices" ] || netdevices=$netdevices_up > netdevices_all=`dmesg|grep "^eth.: "| awk -F: '{print $1}'|sort|uniq` > 672c676,677 < echo "Ethernet cards found: $netdevices" --- > echo "Ethernet cards found: $netdevices_all" > echo "Ethernet cards running: $netdevices_up" -- Thomas