Ubuntu network timeout

DATE: 2019-04-10

AUTHOR: John L. Godlee

I installed a minimal Ubuntu server image on a little Toshiba NB100 netbook I was given as a present and there was an annoying side effect whereby if a wireless network wasn't detected on boot the bootup process would wait for about 5 minutes looking for a network before moving on. This happened every single time I booted up because I preferred to only search for wireless networks manually. The answer was to edit the networking.service config file:

sudo systemctl edit networking.service

Then enter into the file:

Service
TimeoutStartSec=20sec

to set the timeout period when looking for wireless networks to be 20 seconds.

Check the file has the correct information:

systemctl cat networking.service

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