starting ethernet after booting

is there a way to startup the ethernet after the computer is up and running in debian? i have no router [yet], so i've been hotswapping the dsl back and forth between this and my laptop. winXP picks it back up just fine, but debian doesn't recognize the port being used on its own, and rebooting takes a long time.

There should be a script in /etc/init.d.
I think you would '/etc/init.d/networking restart' as root without the quotes to get it restarted. To just start it, you would use '/etc/init.d/networking start'.

ah, excellent. that did the trick