Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 67005
Cannot configure different PCMCIA network cards differently
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:43:17 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020606 Description of problem: I have two PCMCIA network cards with my laptop. One is an ethernet card while the other is a wireless one. The redhat network configurator (neat), or the network scripts, do not let me specify different configurations for the different cards. I need different setups, since the wired ethernet has a static address, while the wireless one has a hdcp assigned one. The problem stems from the fact that at any time I have only one of the cards plugged, and whatever the card it comes up as eth0 and thus tries to use the same configuration. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): redhat-config-network-0.9.10-2 initscripts-6.43-1 kernel-pcmcia-cs-3.1.27-10 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. insert the wired ethernet pcmcia card 2. the iface comes up as eth0 and uses that config 3. eject the wired card 4. insert the wireless pcmcia card 5. the iface comes up as eth0 too 6. the network config used is that of the wired setup Actual Results: When the wireless card is inserted the network setup is incorrect (ip address, gateway, etc.) since it uses teh one from the wired setup. Expected Results: Being able to (optionally) specify a different setup for different pcmcia network cards. For example, something based on the MAC address, or the MAC address family (i.e. the manufacturer part). Additional info:
just make the one ethernet card eth1 and bind it to the MAC address.. see attached snapshot...
Created attachment 62704 [details] snapshot
I cannot make one ethernet card eth1 since it's PCMCIA. If I make one of the cards eth1 (as in snapshot), then it will not come up when I insert it into the PCMCIA slot, since PCMCIA will always give eth0 as the name of the device and hotplug will thus execute "ifup eth0". Then ifup will take the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 config file (which is for the other card). It will notice that the HWADDR does not match, and will try to name eth0 the device with the HWADDR in icfg-eth0, which is not the one that I inserted, so it bails out and the network is not started. I guess that either pcmcia should find a suitable name to give to the inserted interface (in this case eth1) or that ifup should have some mechanism so handle the fact that eth0 can refer to one of a set of interfaces (or something of the like). Packages: kernel-pcmcia-cs-3.1.27-10 initscripts-6.67-1 hotplug-2001_04_24-11
first beta of erratum is available at: ftp://people.redhat.com/harald/redhat-config-network/1.0.1-1/ Most of the bugs reported have been removed, but as in every software change, there could be new bugs introduced. Please report bugs against this with explicitly stating the 1.0.1 version... Thx and please test.
Sorry, but now I'm running RedHat 8.0 which has redhat-config-network-1.1.20-1, so I cannot test the change.
does it work to assign both devices to eth0? you may also use profiles..
Under RedHat 8.0 it is not possible to assign both devices to eth0, unless they appear under different profiles. Not very user-friendly to have to switch profiles in order to plug another card, but at least there is an option. I think that when it comes to pluggable network cards (such as PCMCIA) it should be possible to bind the configuration to the card (maybe by checking its MAC address) and not to a device name (such as eth0).