Description:
After each boot-up with netcfg profiles set without link (ifconfig eth0 | grep RUNNING) I still have to wait for dhcp fail. It's very annoying so I decided to dig into. The reason of fail lays in /usr/lib/network/ethernet.subr: mii_check() which doesn't catch "no link" well. The reason is that mii-tool returns errors like
SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth0' failed: Invalid argument

in case of interface is down (which is surely down at bootup time). Every next instruction fails then because of:

if echo $conn_state|grep "no link" &> /dev/null; then
#if
return 1
#fi
fi
return 0

Fixup:
The one of fixup schemas could be just ifconfig $INTERFACE up in network.subr or even better search for positive nor negative "no link". I'll recommend to add
PRE_UP="ifconfig $INTERFACE up"

in your each /etc/network.d/`profile-name` until clean fixup will be done.

Additional info:
* netcfg 2.1.2-1


Steps to reproduce:
Add profile to NETWORKS=() which configures unlinked interface such as not connected ether. Then reboot (i won't mention about DAEMONS(net-profiles)) and look that you have to wait until dhcp fails. Now try to add PRE_UP="ifconfig $INTERFACE up" into your profile and reboot one more time. Now you can see appropriate behaviour - fast "No connection available" message.