Hello, I have this problem that a new network card is not supported by my Centos operating system and hence I had to recompile the vendor drivers from scratch and create a new RPM package that seems to install properly, specifically in:

/lib/modules/2.6.18-92elPAE/updates/ *.ko
/sbin/bnx2id

Occasionally the NIC is detected after a couple of reboots but mostly not and I wonder how I can troubleshoot to make sure that it is always detected after installation?
I heard that you can use modprobe to load specific modules but should not the new modules at least be loaded into kernel after reboot?

It is a bit urgent for me to solve this problem so all help is greatly appreciated!

Does your NIC start working again after you issue a ? You can use the lsmod command to see which modules are currently loaded.

Do you see any problems related to your NIC in the output of dmesg?

I did some more investigation and found out that after RPM install I did a "depmode -a" followed by "modprobe driver" and now I could detect the module by doing "modprobe -l" and "lsmod".
The NIC was still not detected so I had to do another reboot and this time the network card was detected.

This is progress but I need to make the NIC available without booting so is still possible and what command would I use?

Is it also possible to do a post-install script that would set all network settings when the NIC is available?