Have to unplug/reinsert PCMCIA before the laptop sees it

[MDesigner]

For some odd reason, whenever I boot up, I have to unplug the 802.11b PCMCIA card and reinsert it before I get a network connection. Someone at my girlfriend's work says he's heard of it being a known issue with Linux, but didn't remember how to fix it.

Anyone heard of this before? I'll keep mucking with it and checking system logs to hopefully find out what's going on....

EDIT: It must be a random thing.. I just booted up the laptop and I had net access right away, no problems.

[Icarus]

I've never heard of that problem before...
Next time it happens check the dmesg if there are any errors, and instead of poping the card in and out, try
/etc/init.d/cardmgr stop/start

Maybe that's right, are you still using SuSE?

[MDesigner]

Nope, never used SuSE.. I'm using Slackware 10.0. Sorry, should've specified which distro I'm on.

[rdeschene2]

Enter the wonderful cardctl command. This is provided by the pcmcia package in SuSE 8.1 at least (RPM-based distro). I don't know about Slackware.

Without physically ejecting and reinserting the card in socket 1, you can issue the following commands in a root shell (one line after the other):
cardctl suspend 1 <ENTER>
cardctl resume 1 <ENTER>

Change the 1 to a 0 if the card is in PCMCIA socket 0.

See: man cardctl -- it can do a lot of other things too.

I think this is related to Linux booting up too fast sometimes for the DHCP server (e.g. a router) to assign it an IP address. I have heard of people addressing this by setting up a "delay by x seconds" command in their startup sequence, but I'm not sure exactly how to do that.

It just occured to me that running the cardmgr command (during the bootup sequence) using the -f option might prevent this from happening too.

If you find a permanent solution to this, please post it in this thread. Thanks.