[FC2] PCMCIA network cards starting on boot

[William Hooper]

Scot L. Harris said:
> On Sun, 2004-06-13 at 11:35, D. D. Brierton wrote:
>> I installed FC2 yesterday. Very nice it is too. However, I was somewhat
>>  thrown by my Wi-Fi PCMCIA card failing to start on boot, until after 
>> much searching through the lists I found a post (which I now can't find
>>  again so I can't refer to it) explaining that the solution was to 
>> deselect the "Activate device when computer starts" option in the 
>> network configuration tool, and instead just let the PCMCIA card 
>> services start it. That does indeed do the trick.
[snip] 
> I was plagued by this problem also until someone on the list provided this
> solution.
> 
> I see it as a bug.  I can imagine that someone out there may have more 
> than one pcmcia based network card in their system.  With the current work
> around they would not be able to specify which interface they wanted to
> have active on boot.
[snip]

IIRC it has been this way at least since RH 7.3, maybe longer (looking at bugzilla, longer).  Normally it would just cause the network script to complain because the interface isn't there, but with FC2 it can cause the PCMCIA subsystem to not start correctly.

Browsing a few bugzilla entries shows that moving the script doesn't always fix the issue:

"Because of the way pcmcia works, the ethernet initialization is done in background and there is not much one can do to find out when the network is up and running."

The answer for the multiple NIC situation is to not insert the NIC you don't want started.

-- 
William Hooper