I have a Dell Lattitude CPi 266XT, running fedora core 2. Whenever I boot it up, it never activates my network card which is plugged in to my router. The only way I can get the network interface active (3COM EtherLink III Lan PC Card, model 3C589C) is to delete the profile in the network configuration tool, reboot, then use the internet connection wizard to rediscover it. It will then work and pass traffic, until I reboot. Then it fails to discover it at boot up, and I can't activate it manually. I have to delete it and rediscover it.

What's going on? I always set it to "activate on boot", and it's using DHCP from my router. I even tried swapping ports, cables, and PCMCIA ethernet cards, and I get the same behavior. The device just isn't present, as far as the OS is concerned.

The one thing I'm not sure about is how I configred it when I installed the OS. I inputted a specific host name instead of selecting "get from DHCP". But since I've deleted the profile and rediscovered it multiple times, should that matter? And yes, I have the host name and IP of the laptop in my /etc/hosts file.

Help!

paperdiesel; take a look at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/index.html compatibility,s sections pertaining to your devices. 3,11.12.and 13. or all of 31sections.

Is the driver for the card compiled into the kernel or loaded as a module? If it is a module, you may want to have it loaded at a later run level. If it's in the kernel, you may be able t edit the rc script to have it brought up by ifconfig at a later run level.

Its a module, 3c589_cs.o

I wonder why Fedora is horking on getting a dhcp lease...

After its booted next, open up a terminal and su to root, then try to grab a lease by hand:

su -
(enter password)
dhclient eth0

(lots of giberish, hopefully... )

ping google.com


If it doesn't grab a lease, what's there error? What it looks like is that dhcp is being fired up BEFORE pcmcia is getting started, but that's just silly on FC's part and we would have had about 3000 threads on that by not if it were the case, I wonder what else is going on.

Cheers,

Finegan

ok, here's what I get

prompt) dhclient eth0
Internet Software Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.1rc12
blah blah

sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
eth0: unknown interface: No such device
eth0: unknown interface: No such device
sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
Bind socket to interface: No such device

blah blah blah about a README, software, blah blah

exiting

prompt)

What gives? And for the record, I watch the boot up sequence in detail and yes, fedora is trying to initialize the ethernet card before it starts pcmcia services. But even if it try and activate it from the GUI after bootup, it says it cannot find the device. Here's a listing of lsmod:

3c589_cs size: 9608 used by: 0

???

Hm.. did some googling, found a fix:

http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail...il/000791.html

basically, I executed "modprobe yenta_socket" as root, and the card came to life, my router gave it an IP, and I'm not up and running. I added that line to my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file, so I should be good to go.

Is there anywhere that I can put this in which will make it happen before rc.local? I'd like to fire it sooner in the boot sequence. Also, do I need to do a "modprobe 3c589_cs" or anything afterwards? Is there a better or more secure way to fire up the pcmcia subsystem?

Oh, its that bug...

This cropped up with RedHat some so I don't suspect that much has changed:

/etc/sysconfig/pcmcia

Change the empty PCIC= line to be:

PCIC=yenta_socket

If its blank it probes... sometimes the probe is stupid and fails.

At least, that's my guess.

Cheers,

Finegan

Finegan,

This is strange. So now that I did a "modprobe yenta_socket", which turned on the NIC, the card will light up at boot up. The normal eth0 startup during boot up fails, but the light comes one when it gets to the line in rc.local which does the modprobe. And I verified that "PCIC=yenta_socket" in that pcmcia file.

So here's the strange part: The light on the NIC turns on, but I still have no internet connection. I try to activate it in the GUI, and it says the device is not found. What gives?

To make it really weird, if I delete the network profile all together in the GUI, then reboot, the card will light up during the normal eth0 startup process during boot (this is the ONLY time this happens). Then, with the card light on, I run the internet connection wizard, and it configures, detects, gets an IP address, and I'm good to go. But as soon as I reboot the box, I lose it. The card will light up (from the modprobe line in the rc.local file), but there's no connection, at least not until I nuke it, reboot, and start over.

???

bump..

anyone?

I think the wizard is hosed. Try removing the profile from the wizard and putting the network configuration in rc.local

If the card lights up normally, then the card/pcmcia support gets loaded but no IP address is getting applied, so try putting the IP info in rc.local?

Cheers,

Finegan

What do you mean by putting the config into rc.local? What exactly do I put in there? Also, since the IP address is assigned dynamically from the router, do I still put an ip address in rc.local? If so, how do I input it? I have that info in my /etc/hosts file, but I imagine the syntax will be different.

Do I need to do a modprobe for 3c589_cs after I do a modprobe for yenta_socket?

You can't modprobe card services pcmcia drivers manually, cardmgr has to bind them, but it seems to be up and running fine, so no worries there, it listens on the socket and as soon as yenta is loaded as the driver for the socket, cardmgr will see the card there, compare its info to what it finds in /etc/pcmcia/config (take a look at it, just a text file), and then bind whatever it has info for.

There are cardbus cards where you just hand whack their module into place like a good old PCI card. They're the newer standard, the move is slow right now.

rc.local could look as simple as:

modprobe yenta_socket
ifconfig eth0 up
dhclient eth0

Assuming the nic is eth0, and the ifconfig line is voodoo but some cards misbehave if you don't hand them an up first.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks Finegan. I added those lines to rc.local and will try rebooting today.

Just FMI, how can you tell that cardmgr is running fine without the NIC having any connectivity?

If 3c589_cs is listed under lsmod,

Actually, there's the beep method... no kidding, pcmcia is built so that you hear 1 beep if the socket driver is loaded, and another identical beep if the driver for the card loads right. If that doesn't happen, you hear a second low-toned bonk instead. This is not the same with cardbus cards, you'll always get the second beep but hotplugging might not pick up on the card.

Also,

ps aux | grep cardmgr

Cheers,

Finegan

Finegan,

I added those lines and rebooted, here's the error:

[root//arsenal /etc/rc.d] modprobe yenta_socket
[root//arsenal /etc/rc.d] ifconfig eth0 up
eth0: unknown interface: No such device
[root//arsenal /etc/rc.d] dhclient eth0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.1rc14
Copyright 2004 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/products/DHCP

sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
eth0: unknown interface: No such device
eth0: unknown interface: No such device
sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
Bind socket to interface: No such device


It's also worth noting that after this, I deleted the network config via the GUI, rebooted, and when it was booting, it got stuck in this endless loop of my router trying to give the laptop an IP, and the laptop declining because no device was present. so I rebooted again, this time with the network cable unplugged. once it booted up, I stuck the network cable back in, and the router lit up the port. No internet connectivity, but the router knew the laptop was connected.

I'm so confused. I think that the profile for my nic has an incorrect address in it, so when I use that profile to build a network config, it gets borked. Any ideas? how could I find out the physical address parameters of this nic, and then compare it to what's stored? where do I look for both?