I've been having all kinds of trouble keeping my wlan connection up for more than a few hours, so I decided to take the advice of some on the MythTV forum and setup a wireless bridge to get my mythbox on-line and on my home network. The wireless bridge set-up went very smoothly. I only had to make a minor tweak to my access points. FWIW, I have a Buffalo WBR-G54 router/access point and Buffalo WLA2-G54 repeater/bridge.
I was using ndiswrapper v1.6 with my wlan pci card, so I followed the instructions over at the ndiswrapper installation wiki to remove ndiswrapper. I shutdown and unplugged my mythbox. Physically removed my wlan card and restarted my machine. After I rebooted, I did a CTRL-ALT-F1 and logged in as root. I ran netcardconfig, saying NO to dhcp as I have a static IP for my mythbox. Netcardconfig brought up my eth0 and I was able to ping within my network as well as external websites, i.e. google.com. Everything is good until I reboot. When I reboot my box, eth0 does not start up. I have to manually perform an
Code:
ifup eth0
in order to connect. My network adapter is recognized at boot, but not until late.Quote:
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox kernel: 8139too Fast Ethernet driver 0.9.27
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 0000:00:0b.0
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox kernel: PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 0000:00:08.0
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox kernel: eth0: RealTek RTL8139 at 0xe1dd6c00, 00:11:d8:b5:18:4e, IRQ 10
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox pci.agent[3769]: 8139too: loaded successfully
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 0000:00:0b.0
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox kernel: PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 0000:00:08.0
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox kernel: eth0: RealTek RTL8139 at 0xe1dd6c00, 00:11:d8:b5:18:4e, IRQ 10
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox pci.agent[3769]: 8139too: loaded successfully
I figured out that mii is the module that seems to be loading my 8139too driver by looking at the output of lsmod > lsmod.log. After searching around google and here, I tried what others have done. I added a line to the end of my ~/modprobe.d/aliases
Code:
alias eth0 mii
but still no go on boot. I added Code:
mii
to my /etc/modules and still no go. When I reboot I see an error go by that does not seem to appear in my logs. From what I can quickly read, it's one of these 3 from the mii-tool manual:Quote:
SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth?' failed: Invalid argument
If the interface is not running (up), kernel will refuse to
report its link state.
SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth?' failed: Operation not permitted
Most kernels restrict access to root.
SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth?' failed: No such device
This error is shown, if the kernel does not know about the named
device.
If the interface is not running (up), kernel will refuse to
report its link state.
SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth?' failed: Operation not permitted
Most kernels restrict access to root.
SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth?' failed: No such device
This error is shown, if the kernel does not know about the named
device.
In the course of my research, I found someone who altered their laptop-net start up file.
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=36976#36976 Although my issue was not exactly the same, I tried it out and did a
Code:
update-rc.d laptop-net remove
, but that did not help either. I later did Code:
invoke-rc.d laptop-net
which I presume restored it to the original state. If I'm wrong on that, I'm sure someone here will let me know. 
So, it seems that I need to invoke the mii module earlier in the boot process, but I dod not know how to go about it. Can anyone help?