Hotplug, /etc/network/interfaces and ifup

[Jaime]

Hi.

I have a working installation of Ubuntu Hoary on my laptop which is
doing just one thing I can't understand. It has one ethernet card (3com
3c556b minipci) network card with a "normal" config (private ip address
on internal network, etc). A boot time, hotplug brings the card up: the
installer leaves /etc/network/interfaces with the lines:

auto lo

mapping hotplug
    script grep
    map eth0

When I use "ifup eth0" and "ifdown eth0", everything works just fine.
Just as a test, I added the line:

    up logger canYouFindThis

to the eth0 stanza in the interfaces file, and a quick "tail
-f /var/log/syslog" shows me that everytime I "ifup eth0", the message
is logged.

The bit I don't understand is that if I leave the logger line in the
interfaces file, nothing gets logged during boot-up. All the
documentation I've read talks about "ifup eth0=hotplug" being run during
bootup - I've even tried doing this manually and even that works, so why
is nothing logged when the machine boots?

Any help appreciated,

Jaime :-)