Xircom PCMCIA NIC needs several bounces before it works

[dripton]

I've got a laptop with a Xircom PCMCIA 10/100 Ethernet NIC. PCMCIA uses i82365 driver; NIC uses xirc2ps_cs. pcmcia_cs rather than the built-in kernel PCMCIA drivers. Vanilla 2.4.19 kernel. Static network config, not DHCP.

I got the NIC working manually during the Gentoo install, and can get it working by hand using similar logic, but it always takes me several attempts. I bring it up, and ifconfig and route's output look perfect, but pings to machines on the LAN fail. (Pinging localhost works.) So I take the network down, and bring it up, and it works. Or sometimes it fails again, and I repeat, and then it works. Once it comes up, it works fine for the duration of the machine's uptime.

/etc/modules.autoload: pcmcia_core, i82365, ds. Not xirc2ps -- if it's in there then I get errors in the boot logs. It autoloads later when cardmgr tries to bring up networking. (I say tries because the first attempt always fails.)

/etc/conf.d/net iface_eth0="192.168.0.10 broadcast 192.168.0.255 netmask 255.255.255.0" gateway="eth0/192.168.0.2"

/etc/init.d/net.eth0, and /etc/init.d/net.lo depend() { use pcmcia }

/etc/runlevels/default has a link to /etc/init.d/pcmcia, as the docs suggest.

net.eth0 start says "Starting pcmcia cardmgr[pid]: watching 2 sockets Bringing eth0 up... Setting default gateway..." as expected.

I went ahead and filled in my network values in /etc/pcmcia/network.opts, which didn't seem to help. Then I cleared them back out since they're in /etc/conf.d/net. Which is correct?

When I eject and hot-plug the pcmcia NIC I get beeps and log messages each time, but this doesn't fix the network.

It appears that stuff like sshd that depends on "net" starts up based on net.lo rather than net.eth0, which seems wrong, especially if net.lo starts up before pcmcia. So I presume net.lo should also depend on pcmcia, though the docs only mention doing this for eth0 not lo? Am I right?

Should net.lo run from a runlevel? (It's in boot by default.) Docs say net.eth0 should not since cardmgr should start it. They don't mention lo. cardmgr doesn't seem to start lo so I suppose it needs to stay in boot.

Re-emerged pcmcia-cs out of paranoia, even though it already matched my kernel version.

I can cobble up a script that automates the process of bouncing eth0 until a ping command succeeds, but this is ugly to say the least. There has to be a cleaner solution.

Anyone seen similar starting problems with Xircom or other PCMCIA NICs having problems starting up, but eventually succeeding after several attempts? Found a soltution? Thanks.