eth0 before pcmcia

[D. D. Brierton]

On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 02:34, Price Technology wrote:
> I almost said "cart before the horse"
> 
> I remember some discussion about this, but it's been eons and I don't
> recall the solution, if there was one.
> 
> In the process of booting, Fedora tries to connect to the network before
> initializing pcmcia.  Since I have a pc card NIC, this doesn't work very
> well.  The NIC does ultimately get an IP and I'm on the network without
> any intervention on my part, it's just the long pause and the error as
> it times out during the boot sequence.
> 
> Is there any way I can rearrange thing where pcmcia starts first, then
> the network, or can I hard code something that will at least shorten the
> timeout and / or eliminate the error message ??

I'm using a fresh install of FC2 with all updates installed, so if
you're not YMMV, but the solution when I first came across this problem
was in the Network settings tool to set all PCMCIA NICs including
Wireless ones to *not* start on boot (because the PCMCIA scripts
automatically start any NICs which are PCMCIA cards anyway). I have no
long pauses, and no error messages on boot. That way, I believe, the
part in the boot sequence when it says "bringing up network interfaces"
just brings up the loopback interface.

As I understood the discussion when I first asked about this on this
list, there is no obvious "fix" for this (I use scare quotes because it
is debatable whether there is any problem needing a fix). If you try to
start PCMCIA before the network services, the PCMCIA service will try to
start you NIC card, but the network stuff hasn't been started and so
that fails. If you tell the network services to start your NIC that
fails because the PCMCIA service hasn't been started yet. It makes sense
I think, although I have never understood how come it worked in RHL9
when I had it set for the network service to start my PCMCIA Wi-Fi card
on boot -- if the card was present the network service would wait
silently in the background without error until the PCMCIA service
started. (I can't remember now what it used to do if the card wasn't
present, but it certainly wasn't anything that annoyed me like causing a
massive pause or generating scary sounding warnings.)

Best, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren at dzr-web.com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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