Questions with configuring multiple NIC's

[J Ramos]

Hello,

I'm currently running 5.3 on a HP Pavillion ze4420us laptop. Pretty much 
everything that I would
like to get working works, with the exception of my NIC's. The onboard 
National Semiconductor DP83815/16 works fine by itself with the sis driver. 
I have 2 pcmcia wireless ethernet cards, that
"work." Linksys WPC11 v4 wireless B card is recognized via XP drivers and 
ndis, as is the
Netgear WG511, also through XP drivers and ndis. I'm having a tough time 
getting the wireless
cards configured correctly with ifconfig. I believe that the problem is with 
the netmasks. Seems
like I read somewhere that 2 NIC's on the same machine connected to the same 
network may
not share the same netmask. One should be 255.255.255.0 and the other should 
be
255.255.255.255. sis driver support is built in to the kernel, GENERIC 
kernel from install, which
I will probably have to rebuild shortly. Not being able to kldunload the si 
and if_sis modules
keeps sis0 constantly in ifconfig. If I unplug the cable and try to run only 
a wireless card, it doesn't
seem to work correctly. ifconfig'ing ndis0 to a good ip and 255.255.255.0 
netmask says the
network is down when trying to ping the router. Using the 255.255.255.255 
netmask with ndis0,
pinging the router  leads to "ping: sendto: Host is down." However, the 
interesting thing is that
I get a message from arp, "io kernel: arp: 192.168.1.1 is on sis0 but got 
reply from
00:09:5b:dd:c4:f8 ( the router mac address) on ndis0." Although sis0 is not 
on the network, my
machine is acting like it since sis0 can be disabled, but the modules can't 
be unloaded. Here's my
point...

Would I be better off rebuilding a kernel with sis driver support not built 
in, but instead loading
the modules and ifconfig'ing only the interface I need at that point in 
time, and if I need to change,
just unload the modules I don't need, and load the ones I do, then ifconfig 
the new active
interface?

There may be a more elegant solution, and I'd be happy to hear them, or any 
links or man pages
that I probably overlooked.

Thanks much,
Josh