On Mon, Mar 06, 2000 at 07:20:08AM -0800, Hausheer, Geoffrey wrote:
> I installed the 'frozen' distribution onto my laptop last week, (as a
> replacement for Slack).  Everything seems to work great except that my
> network connection is flaky.  On bootup it randomly either gets starts the
> dhcp client daemon or doesn't.

error messages?

> I have tried using both pump and dhcpcd and get the same results.  I
> alsways see the "Starting dhcp client daemon: dhcpcd." message, but
> sometimes the lights on the cable-modem flash (in which case a 'ps ax'
> shows dhcpcd (or pump) running) and sometimes I don't.  When I log in
> as root, I and run '/etc/init.d/dhcpcd start' (or pump) the dhcp
> client alwaysstarts up.  This is really driving me nuts (especially
> since it is not easily reproducable).  Does anyone have any ideas?
> 
> The only two things I could think of were:
>       the dhcp client is started immediately after the pcmcia driver (the
> network operates through my pcmcia network card).  Could the card take some
> time after cardmgr et al are brought up before it is ready to go?

It very well could. I've dealt with laptops with pcmcia network cards
before (RedHat though, it wasn't my laptop or it'd have had Debian).
cardmgr started, and the boot process got through quite a few more
daemons before the ethernet card was ready to work.

On that box, there was a script set to run after the card was
successfully initalized that set up the networking related information
(and again to take it down when the card was removed).

>       my /etc/networks/interfaces file has no entry for eth0 (the network
> card)  should it?

Looking at the same file on my computer (many helpful comments! Download
the source and pull the file if you don't have it), this section looks
helpful.

# A PCMCIA ethernet DHCP client:
#
# iface eth0 inet dhcp
#     noauto
#
# (note, this won't work unless you specifically change the file
# /etc/pcmcia/network to look more like:
#
#     if [ -r ./shared ] ; then . ./shared ; else . /etc/pcmcia/shared ;
#     fi
#     get_info $DEVICE
#     case "$ACTION" in
#         'start')
#             /sbin/ifup -s "$SCHEME" $DEVICE
#             ;;
#         'stop')
#             /sbin/ifdown -s "$SCHEME" $DEVICE
#             ;;
#     esac
#     exit 0
#
# This is not at all supported at present. You have been warned.)

Even though it warns that it's not supported, it looks similar to the
working setup i've seen ;) Or you could just edit /etc/pcmcia/network to
start pump or dhcpcd itself and ignore /etc/network/interfaces
completely.


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