PCMCIA Wireless Best Practice

[Patrick Nelson]

FC3 Up to date

I have a couple systems that are connected to the internet and also 
connected to a private network that is wireless.  These systems act as 
firewalls and gateways and mailservers.  Enough background here is the 
problem (maybe).

I think I might be doing something wrong although I can get things 
working ok, but any network restart shuts down my wireless network 
pcmcia cards on these systems and I have to reboot to bring them back 
up.  Just default install doesn't work so, I have a specific process to 
bring the cards on line:

 1. set up the cards with system-config-network and then disable them at 
boot
 2. move the run order of pcmcia init script (s24) beyond the network 
init script (s10)
 3. reboot the system

This causes a couple of delays with some of the daemons between s10 and 
s24 (like named) but at least it works.

The problem with this working solution is that if I (or any app) does a 
service network restart, the pcmcia card no longer responds (although 
the light on the card does stay on).  I've tried doing the sequence of:

 service network stop
 service pcmcia stop
 service network start
 service pcmcia start

to mimic what happens when the system boots.  But this does not work and 
I would really just like to have service network restart work anyway. 

So I was waiting on a rainy day to figure out what is wrong and what 
would be the best way to fix it.  And I have read through the 
documentation of pcmcia-cs and it states that I may need to edit 
/etc/pcmcia/network.opts file so that network init works correctly.  So 
my question is:

 what is the best configuration of this wireless card, on a system that 
has a NIC as well?

.