[plug] dead network

[Craig Ringer]

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>  It would appear the 2.2 kernel is unable to recognise this card as a
>PNP card, even though I have the PNP option selected in make
>menuconfig.  Unless someone can suggest a way to reactive this feature,
>I guess I'll have to boot DOS and reset the card's parameters.
>
Thats not really an ideal solution, as its just by chance/guesswork that 
the kernel gets IRQ 5 if its misidentifying the card and/or its 
parameters. You'd be better off building the NIC driver as a module, and 
adding a line to /etc/modules.conf to provide explicit parameters and 
avoid autodetection entirely.
    options <modulename> irq=<irq>
should help. Just add the module name to /etc/modules so it loads almost 
immediately after init starts (well, early in /etc/rcS.d/* or 
/etc/init.d/rc.sysinit, distro depending) and see if that helps.

For testing purposes, you can rmmod the driver module after bringing 
down the interface, then modprobe to load it back in - but you can 
specify arguments to the driver after the modprobe command, eg
    modprobe smcwhatevevermodule io=0x999 irq=5

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