Networking :: CF boot / PCMCIA NIC problem



First, I *love* DSL.  Thanks so much to the development team for a truly fantastic effort...you guys rule.

My Compaq Armada 4131T has 48M of ram and has recently quit talking to one of the IDE buses, making my CD ROM and Hard Drive completely inaccessible.  Despite this minor inconvenience, I did a frugal install on a 64MB CF card, popped it into a PCMCIA adapter, and used Robert's brilliant PCMCIAfloppy image to boot DSL.  Works like a champ.

Here's the problem: my 16 bit PCMCIA wireless card will not come up on the network, even though the card is detected and seems to be functioning properly.  After a thorough scouring of the forums I thought I had found the problem, and booted with nodhcp (to avoid conflicting pumps) -- but I still cannot get a manual pump to put me on the network.

The PCMCIA card is an "Enterasys" that comes up on PCMCIA Tool as "Cabletron Roam About".  It loads the hermes, orinoco, and orinoco_cs modules in lsmod.  The card has two lights, and the power light comes on.  When I switch to root and 'ifconfig eth0 up', then 'iwconfig eth0 essid "mynet"' I get a couple of nice flashes from the card and it appears to find my wireless router.  Next I try pump -i eth0..."operation failed".  Taking some advice I found on the forum I booted with syslog turned on, and tailed the messages log.  When I reinsert the card it dutifully reports loading all three modules, and tells me that the card is ready.  After a pump -v command the log reports that the gateway, etc are 0.0.0.0, but I don't know how to change that or if it's even necessary (seems like it shouldn't be), but after a while I still get "operation failed" under the pump command.  I have also tried building a static route to my gateway and/or my wireless router, but that's not working either.  Could be my inexperience with the route command, however.

I have tried booting with the card in socket 0 and socket 1.  When I boot, regardless of the position of the card, it lists the orinoco, hermes, and orinoco_cs modules as unavailable, however it finds the CF card as /dev/hda1 and runs the normal detection sequence.  I have tried the nopcmcia cheatcode, since cardmgr seems to be started twice in the sequence when booting with the pcmcia modules disk, but the symptoms are the same.  I also tried copying the orinoco.o, orinoco_cs.o, and hermes.o files to the pcmcia driver disk.  This changes my error message at cardmgr initialization to "device not available", but the symptoms are the same once I get into the operating system.  BTW, it appears that when booting using the PCMCIAfloopy.img the system only looks for modules in the floppy mounted /additional_modules/ directory, but I could be wrong on that.  I have also tried inserting the NIC at various times during and after system startup, but again the symptoms are the same...card detected, acts normal, won't pull an address with pump.  I've also tried static IP, but that won't talk to the network either.

I know this card works with DSL, I have connected with it on this very machine with no problems (CD boot, when that was working), and have also had success connecting with it on my HP omnibook running DSL.  I'm also sure the network implementation works fine running from CF card frugal, I have connected with a PCMCIA linksys 10/100 etherfast PC Card (wired) and got a trouble free connection (i.e. two PCMCIA cards running, CF card adapter and NIC).  I'm using the 3.4 iso, BTW.

Sorry this post is so long, but really appreciate any advice you can give -- I must be missing something really simple!

respectfully,
Doug
Maybe you have conflicting drivers - maybe only one of those three is needed?

Did the automatic pump work with cd boot?
Curaga -- thank you for your quick reply!  For some reason those three drivers always load with this card, it seems to work fine under normal circumstances.  The automatic pump worked great with the CD boot...I never needed any manual configuration at all.

Thanks!
Doug
I'm outta ideas what could cause it working on cd but not on CF.. Could you try booting without the card in, then plugging it in, removing all the drivers and trying one at a time (both pump & manual ip)?
Okay, I'll try that right now.
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