what brings up the wireless network interface

[Kamaraju S Kusumanchi <kamaraju@bluebottle.com>]

Using Debian stable (Etch), 2.6.18-4-686 kernel on Debian Dell Inspiron
e1505. The wireless card (from lshw output is)

*-network DISABLED
     description: Wireless interface
     product: PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection
     vendor: Intel Corporation
     physical id: 0
     bus info: pci@0b:00.0
     logical name: eth2
     version: 02
     serial: 00:13:02:9e:cc:1b
     width: 32 bits
     clock: 33MHz
     capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
     configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ipw3945 driverversion=1.1.2dmpr
firmware=13.0 1:0 () ip=128.84.152.138 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes
wireless=IEEE 802.11a
     resources: iomemory:dfcff000-dfcfffff irq:169


The relevant stanza in /etc/network/interfaces is

# allow-hotplug eth2
# auto eth2
# iface eth2 inet dhcp
# wireless-essid SomeThing
# wireless-mode Managed

I commented out this stanza and did

$sudo ifconfig eth2 down

Even after that, eth2 interface comes up after some time for no reason. I
believe it is due to dhclient, since I see messages like the following
in /var/log/syslog

Aug  7 12:15:10 kusumanchi dhclient: DHCPREQUEST on eth2 to 132.236.56.249
port 67

But I dont know how to prevent the automatic configuring of this wireless
device. I do not want to remove dhclient since it is essential when I do
want to bring up eth2.

$dpkg -l \*dhcp\* | grep ^ii
ii  dhcp3-client   3.0.4-13       DHCP Client
ii  dhcp3-common   3.0.4-13       Common files used by all the dhcp3*
packages

Any suggestions?

thanks
raju

-- 
Kamaraju S Kusumanchi
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/kk288/
http://malayamaarutham.blogspot.com/