Linux/BSD with two wireless NICs

[frog]

Everytime I throw two wireless NICs in a box running FreeBSD or Linux it seems the Operating system has trouble detecting or loading the driver/configuring the second adapter. The operating system will usually create at least one virtual interface that works(wlan0 usually). I run dmesg and it goes through the motions to configure one interface but not the other..

Does anybody have experience with this problem? Any help is appreciated. I'm wondering if I have two NICs that are supported by these operating systems and have confirmed this by using them individually so I know this is not a driver-compatibility issue. Maybe something in the OS that needs to be tweaked? Please help.

[proxx]

Well no problems really
I just let one handle by something like WICD and the other one by wpa_supplicant.
Or just 2 with wpa_supplicant.

You could try to modprobe them individually and or in reverse order.
What manager are you using?

[frog]

Well I'm using NetworkManager, which might have something to do with the conflict.. I've used NetworkManager on a laptop that had a PCMCIA wireless NIC and an internal mini-pci wireless NIC. Network manager was able to see and handle both interfaces just fine. I'm speculating maybe it has something to do with the fact that the NICs I'm trying to work with are both PCI interface cards.

When I get home from work tonight I'm going to disable NetworkManager from init.d and try configuring them manually using /etc/network/interfaces. The main problem I'm having is that ifconfig/iwconfig is showing only one wireless interface even though there are 2 plugged in and running dmesg shows that both of the cards and loads the appropriate drivers..

Any more ideas?

[proxx]

Oke let me tell you one thing, the first day you stop NM is the last day of all your trouble.
Heck even world peace is near.

Try this;
kill all network manager etc related shit.
(Which distro are you using?, ubuntu can be a real bitch with this.)

Do;
wpa_passphrase YOUR_SSID SECRETP@SSW0RD > YOUR_SSID.conf
wpa_supplicant -Dwext -i wlan0 -c YOUR_SSID.conf
wpa_supplicant -Dwext -i wlan1 -c YOUR_SSID.conf

Do a manual DHCP request with dhcpcd or whatevers in your distro.

This should work.
Remember that rfkill might be a buzz killer.

btw iwconfig -a doesnt show anything?

[frog]

I know the perils of using NetworkManager. I will provide dmesg and ifconfig -a output(showing only 1 of the 2 wireless interfaces physically plugged into the motherboard) and we'll go from there. I'm not able to try disabling NetworkManager and manually configuring these interfaces atm. I'm at work but once I'm done I'll try some things and post another reply later on.

Thanks for your response.

EDIT: This problem has been solved; I guess this particular Realtek chipset just wasn't supported. I replaced the card with a Ralink based card and everything is working. I'm going to set it up as a gateway for my network using one interface as my WAN link(a client bridge to an access point), the other will be used as broadcast using hostapd and will run the DHCP server for my internal network. I'm not sure if this will work as I've never done it before but I'm pretty sure if I bridge the two interfaces and configure everything correctly(modifying /etc/network/interfaces and dhcpd.conf) it will work.
Any corrections are welcome.