Martin ‘Joey’ Schulze
PCMCIA Network Devices - From cardmgr to udev
Recent updates in sid and a reboot has caused the PCMCIA subsystem recognised differently. It wasn’t work working as expected and required some debugging first.
The cardmgr daemon that operates on top of /etc/pcmcia is deprecated in Debian unstable and replaced by pccardd from the pcmciautils package. It is now used to monitor PCMCIA slots for new and removed devices. If you have formerly used /etc/pcmcia/network.opts to configure your PCMCIA network card, you’ll have to reconfigure your network when upgrading.
The daemon uses the udev and hotplug subsystem to execute commands and configure recently discovered devices. On a Debian system the network is generally configured in /etc/network/interfaces. This is the place where udev expects the network configuration for hotplug devices as well.
For a PCMCIA network card this file requires an entry like the following when udev/hotplug should configure it via DHCP:
allow-hotplug eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
You’ll have to find out which name your new network device has, though. This information is noted in /sys/bus/pcmcia/devices and you can also execute ifconfig $device to see the current setting, even though ifconfig may not display it yet. The ‘allow-hotplug’ setting will allow hotplug to configure this device, otherwise it would be ignored by the hotplug subsystem.
Additionally, the start_fn() and stop_fn() routines that could be used in /etc/pcmcia/network.opts need to be ported to /etc/network/if-up.d and /etc/network/if-down.d respectively. The $IFACE environment variable is passed to scripts in these directories, so that one can limit the execution to certain network devices.
EDIT:
Molim bez offtopica!