Wireless card detection

[Phil Meyer]

Fernando Apesteguía wrote:
> Hello people,
>
> Since I installed FC6 I'm experiencing some problems with my ipw2200.
> Sometimes, when I boot, the wireless card is not properly detected.
> The output for ifconfig -a is:
>
> __tmp2093065627 Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:0E:35:FD:AA:0F
>          BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>          RX packets:1284 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
>          TX packets:1284 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
>          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
>          RX bytes:3144632 (2.9 MiB)  TX bytes:3144632 (2.9 MiB)
>          Interrupt:16 Memory:54020000-54020fff
>
> while usually is eth1.
>
> If I try to use that name with for example dhclient, I get:
> SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
> eth1: unknown interface: No such device
> eth1: unknown interface: No such device
> Bind socket to interface: No such device
>
> The problem only disappears after rebooting (sometimes I have to 
> reboot twice)
>
> I can not find any pattern here.
> I looked for in bugzilla and I couldn't find any bugs about this so, I
> would like to know if more people has this problem (or if it is
> solved) before reporting a bug.
>
> Thanks in advance
>

Check /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 for:
HWADDR=

If not set, set it.  If set incorrectly, set it correctly.

Also check your firmware version:

# ls -l /lib/firmware
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 191142 Mar  7  2006 ipw2200-bss.fw
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 185660 Mar  7  2006 ipw2200-ibss.fw
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 187836 Mar  7  2006 ipw2200-sniffer.fw
...

Symptoms are exactly as you describe.  Workaround is to:

# ifdown eth1
# rmmod ipw220
# modprobe ipw2200
# ifup eth1

That should work every time, but indicates that the firmware may be bad, 
or HWADDR is wrong in the ifcfg-eth1 file.

Good luck!