On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, David Young wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 01:59:40PM +0100, Stephen Borrill wrote:
>> I've been installing our stripped down NetBSD 4.0 based software on 15
>> identical Dell Latitude 100L laptops with cardbus ral(4) cards. The
>> customer is using 64-bit WEP. We are using the very latest netbsd-4
>> sources. On 13 of the 15, everything works fine; ral0 associates in about
>> 5 seconds and dhclient runs fine. On the other 2, the network status
>> eventually shows as active (after say 20 seconds), but dhclient doesn't
>> get an address (and a manually configured address doesn't work). The BSSID
>> and channel are found and correct. It's not a network card issue, I've
>> tried swapping.
>
> Perhaps your ral cards draw a lot of power, and there are marginal
> supplies on the CardBus slots of the odd 2 laptops.

Just to get closure on this...

We found that using a card with a 30% lower power consumption reliably 
worked and also that switching from a 3Com access point to Linksys got the 
ral(4) cards working almost perfectly (a few small drop outs). So I think 
it was an interaction of low sensitivity access points and cards 
struggling to get enough power.

So not a NetBSD problem at all.

-- 
Stephen