Shut down problems

[David Christian <dchristian@macalester.edu>]

The situation:
The DHCP server at my school was having problems, and so my eth0 interface
was down.  I tried to shut down my machine for one reason or another.  The
machine sat there hanging at the "Shutting down eth0" stage...

I went to lunch.

I came back, it was still hanging there, so I reboot the machine.  What I
want to know is, is there way to tell Linux during shut down mode to just
skip over a step if its not working?  Or is rebooting the only way to get
out of that nasty trap?

Thanks,
Dave