Relationship between /etc/network, /etc/pcmcia, and /etc/apm

["Joe Emenaker" <joe@emenaker.com>]

I'm having trouble sorting this out.

I've got a laptop running Debian. Depending on whether I'm home or at
work, I'll have either a wireless network card (Lucent Orinocco) or a
wired network card (Xircom RealPort) in the unit. For convenience, I
hardly ever shut the machine down... I just have it suspend-to-disk and
then resume later.. after having inserted the appropriate network card
for the location.

My problem comes from the fact that the networking stuff doesn't always
come back to life when I resume. Specifically, the Xircom card seems to
be problematic. For some reason, dhcp doesn't work on the Xircom unless
it is first put into promiscuous mode. So... somewhere (I don't remember
where), I have a "ifconfig eth0 up promisc" line. This seems to work
fine when I'm booting from scratch, but not when I'm resuming from a
suspend. My guess is that the sequence of things that happen during a
resume doesn't involve the piece I have that invokes promiscuous mode.

So, anyway... I was trying to get a handle on how all of the
/etc/network, /etc/pcmcia and /etc/apm pieces fit together.

Some specific questions I have are:

1 - I've noticed that /etc/pcmcia has a "network" script (with
network.opts) and a "wireless" script (with wireless.opts). What
determines which of these gets invoked? Do they do complementary tasks
(in other words, do wireless cards need "network" AND "wireless" to be
run)?

2 - If I recall correctly, when I insert a pcmcia card (or when I resume
from suspend), cardmgr invokes a "cardctl insert" or something like
that. What chain of events/scripts is triggered by this?

3 - On a non-laptop that's going to use dhcp, I would configure for dhcp
in /etc/network/interfaces, no? However, on my laptop, I've noticed that
/etc/pcmcia has a lot of files that mention dhcp. What's the advantage
of configuring dhcp there? Also, what happens in the event of a
conflict, where /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/pcmcia/*.opts call for
different IP's or if one calls for dhcp and the other specifies an IP?

- Joe