PCMCIA NIC bootup and hotswap problems

[jcosters]

Hi all

I'm having problems using a 3Com 574 PCMCIA NIC in my Toshiba Satellite 2060CDS notebook. I configured pcmcia and put the pcmcia script in the boot runlevel. When I boot with the nic inside the pcmcia slot, eth0 gets brought up by the pcmcia script, but after that, entering runlevel 3, for some strange reason eth0 gets brought down again:

Bringing up eth0 ... OK
Entering runlevel 3
Bringing down eth0 ... OK

I have to manually call dhcpcd to get on the network again after that.

Also, hotplugging the nic after bootup does not work: the device is not brought up by cardmgr. This *should* work normally, or am I missing something here?

FYI - I use 1.4rc3 with gentoo-sources, I disabled pcmcia support in the kernel (as pcmcia-cs takes care of this task), and enabled hotpluggable device support.

[jcosters]

this thread has a solution for the hotswapping problem.

this thread explains the problem with the current gentoo init scripts messing up the shutdown of the pcmcia NIC.