Address-less ethernet interface

[Anand Buddhdev <arb@anand.org>]

Hi everyone,

I have looked through a Debian book I have, as well as Google and archive 
searches, but I can't figure out how to activate an ethernet interface on 
Debian at boot time without assigning any IP address to it.

I have a system with eth0, eth1 and eth2. eth1 and eth2 have IP addresses, 
and are defined in /etc/network/interfaces. eth0 is connected to a 
monitoring switch port, so that I can run "tcpdump -i eth0 ...." to 
capture traffic on the network.

I don't need any IP address on eth0, but I need it to be up. I can 
manually run "ifconfig eth0 up", but I can't figure out how to do this 
automatically at boot time. I have tried to put in the following 
in /etc/network/interfaces:

auto eth0
iface eth0

However, ifup complains about incomplete parameters. Does anyone know the 
correct way to solve this problem? Please keep in mind that I can already 
do this from an /etc/rc.local script or somesuch, but I consider those 
kind of solutions to be a hack, and I prefer to do things the 
way "proper" way, ie. using the distro's scripts.

TIA,

-- 
Anand