I am a noob and found this useful after having had issues a couple times with unplugging the ethernet cable and moving it back and forth between my desktop and laptops.
Also as far as I recall the eth0 was not running after my full HD install so I had to find the admin interface and do the setup manually to get my net running.
ifplugd is a Linux daemon which will automatically configure your ethernet device when a cable is plugged in and automatically unconfigure it if the cable is pulled. This is useful on laptops with onboard network adapters, since it will only configure the interface when a cable is really connected.
It also needs libdaemon to run.
It is in the repository just would need to be added to the distro and installed as default.
