[FC2] PCMCIA network cards starting on boot

[Jeff Vian]

Scot L. Harris wrote:

>On Sun, 2004-06-13 at 11:35, D. D. Brierton wrote:
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>>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.
>>
>>However, I wondered what the status of this behaviour is. Is it a bug?
>>On my system (Dell Inspiron 8200 with Dell badged Intersil Prism 2
>>802.11b PCMCIA card) selecting "activate device when computer starts"
>>seemed to completely stop the PCMCIA services from doing anything with
>>the Prism 2 card at all -- the status light never comes on, and it was
>>impossible to bring the network interface up manually. If this is not
>>considered a bug then I believe the part of either Anaconda or Firstboot
>>which asks you which network interfaces you want started at boot should
>>be altered so that network interfaces which are on a PCMCIA card are not
>>listed and some simple explanation of this is displayed. What do others
>>think?
>>    
>>
>
>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.
>
>The fix would have to be somewhere in the code that defers the startup
>of the network interface until after the pcmcia services are started. 
>Either that or the order of starting pcmcia before network services
>needs to be changed. 
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>
this is set by the numbers for S25pcmcia and  S10network in /etc/rcX.d.
If you change the number part of these it will change the sequence of 
services starting. (lower numbers start first)

I believe that the distro should change its policy and put pcmcia 
services before network services by default, but until they do, this fix 
is easy.

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