Network startup

Question

At home I have my laptop with arch linux connected to my computer downstairs and the network is configured using dhcp. When I take my laptop with me to work it is not connected however and it sits there trying to connect to a computer that isn't there because it is not hooked up to anything. After a while it decides the network is down and gives me a login prompt.
Is there a way to reduce the time it waits before it gives me a prompt?
I have looked in the /etc/rc.d/network script but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Anyone have any ideas on this? (perhaps reducing the time it waits is a bad idea...I dunno)
Thanks!
HC

Answer 1

... adding a "-t 12" to the ifup() /etc/rc.d/network was the first thing i changed after installing arch on my laptop and booting offline the first time waiting 1min ... it is a nice workaround (you have to use on some distros with simmilar startup-scripts) but it leads to some not nice things:
-> if you connect again to a LAN, you have to start the network manually (# /etc/rc.d/network start)
-> in shutdown-sequence, it will complain about network not running
=> it works, of course, but as i'm a semi-perfectionist, i was thinking about another way to solve the 1min-waiting:
i wanted to actually background "dhcpcd" imediately after start, so that the bootprocess can go on and the "dhcpcd" waits in the background for an answer the whole 60s
(at the UNI, we have a really slow dhcp-server, that if i had the -t to less than 28 i dont get an ip :-( but on the other side, i dont want to wait 29s to know that there is no LAN connected to my laptop)
unfortunately the dhcpcd has no option to go to background 
-> anybody to know how to say the dhcpcd to go to background (without rewriting the whole startup-scripts!)?
then i got an idea about another way to handle this: what about changing the /etc/rc.multi to offer to press a key (e.g. "n" == "This Daemon? [N]o thanx!") while a daemon is starting to stop the starting of this daemon
the advantage of a such solution: you dont need to set an timeout-value which may hinder you to connect to a LAN that responds slowly or have to wait for nothing
:::: the problem is: i have no idea how you can do this () --- gurus, please help ... the part that has to be changed looks now like this:
# Start daemons
for daemon in "${DAEMONS[@]}"; do
if [[ `echo $daemon | grep '^[^!]' | wc -l` -eq 1 ]]; then
/etc/rc.d/$daemon start
fi
done
-> shortly said: i want to be able to kill "/etc/rc.d/$daemon start" while it is running by pressing only one key on my keyboard