Led flashing, but link working.

hi folks,

In my experience, a flashing led on this pcmcia NIC 3Com Etherlink III
means misconfigured. But for some reason its working now. Its not
an Activity LED showing the ARP (i think) messages, the duty cycle is
wrong at ~50%

Im hoping to understand why

The only unusual thing here is that I recently got a wireless-router-nat
box and have been messing around with my network topology. Ive yet to
reduce those trials to a well-formed question but..

The one thing I can think of that could affect current setup is this:
the wire card (brand above) has been recently plugged into
BOTH the hub, where it gets its IP via DHCP from the DSL router,
AND the wireless router, where it gets a different IP from another DHCP
server.

Could DHCP leases have something to do with the flashing yet working ?

eth0 is wireless, eth1 is above card.

[jimc@harpo jimc]$ ip addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP> mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue
link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
inet 127.0.0.1/8 brd 127.255.255.255 scope host lo
3: eth0: <BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 100
link/ether 00:40:05:de:3a:25 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet 192.168.1.100/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global eth0
inet 192.168.11.2/24 brd 192.168.11.255 scope global eth0:0
inet 192.168.42.2/24 brd 192.168.42.255 scope global eth0:2
inet 192.168.1.2/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global secondary eth0:1
5: eth1: <BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 100
link/ether 00:10:4b:df:00:d8 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet 10.0.0.4/24 brd 10.0.0.255 scope global eth1
inet 192.168.11.3/24 brd 192.168.11.255 scope global eth1:0
inet 192.168.1.92/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global eth1:1
[jimc@harpo jimc]$

Note the link numbers - not 1,2,3 as I would expect. Is this a hint of
DHCP reservations ?

I guess theres 2 other things:

I have several alias-interfaces on both of them. this is left-over from
a previous - poor-mans private network. Since the DSL router-dhcp
serves up 10.0.0.x, I used static IPs in 192.168.1.x. This gave me
some measure of 'privacy', at least in the rather benign network behind
the nat-dsl

With the addition of the wireless, which also dhcp-serves up
192.168.1.x, I may have some conflicts, per this earlier post ( Tauno
Voipio )

You have both interfaces in the same subnet. It makes it impossible
> to simply route the traffic via both interfaces.
>
> The routing problem will be the default route: there can be only
> one default route in a system, and it's used for the Net.

127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 10.0.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0
eth1
0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0
eth0

Im in violation of the 1-default-route, and will be reading the HOWTO,
but after pulling the wireless card, and doing 'service network restart'
I still have the working, flashing NIC.

Again, the wire card is not currently plugged into the
wireless-router-hub, its on the middle network (a DMZ-lite), on which
the wireless box gets 10.0.0.2 from the Dsl-box.

sorry for the possible? lack of clarity in above desc.

jimc