Way to temporarily turn off Ethernet interface?

Can you temporarily turn off the Ethernet interface (that is, the interface is turned off but the next time the system boots, it will boot with the interface activated), and if so, how?

I'm looking for a command similar to Linux's ifdown (which isn't persistent).

Thanks,
networkstudent

 

You could delete the driver in device manager and plug and play will find it on startup and install the driver.

JC

 

I'd look to stop a service. If the service is set to Automatic, it will restart on reboot. The next question is which service. The Workstation service is the basic networking client service. Stopping this will turn off all outgoing network connections. For incoming services the the Server service does the same. So at a command prompt:

net stop workstation
net stop server

Will stop all network connections. The connections will be recovered on reboot.

The one issue with this is dependant services. If you are doing this manually, you can just OK the pop-up that prompts you to stop dependant services. If you want to stop the services with a script you can use the /Y option:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;89356