[svlug] WiFi PCMCIA card troubleshooting

[Steve Hill]

I am running Debian and for the first time on a laptop, I have it 
installed with a builtin ethernet port (eth0) and a PCMCIA 802.11b WiFi 
card (eth1).

I can run cardctl ident, and get the proper response about my card, plus 
the indicator light is on, so I'm almost positive (only a fool is 
totally positive) that the card is "operational".  I also ran lsmod to 
make sure that the appropriate drive module was loaded.

When I boot, it shows that eth0 is down (since I am not plugged into the 
cat5,) and, before I screwed up and changed a file without making a copy 
first (!!!) it used to come up with eth1 working.

There was one problem that I was having, and that was that in order to 
properly set up my default gateway, I had to ifconfig eth1 down, then 
up, and THEN run the "route add default gw 192.168.1.1".  Can anyone 
suggest how to make the card (once I get it working again) come up with 
the proper routing, automagically?

Then, as I mentioned before, I made a change (i think in the interfaces 
file) that killed the card being recognized as available
thru ifconfig.  Can someone explain what I am not doing correctly to 
"glue" the card to the eth1 device?  I understand the troubleshooting
steps up to the orinoco module being loaded, and also what to do, once I 
have the device showing via ifconfig, but I don't understand how to
bridge that lack of knowledge.