Question on starting NIC

[wswartz]

I'm running RedHat 7.3 on a Dell CPi laptop; all is working well. One little annoying issue though. After I boot my machine, I have to manually tell it to start the network cards. Here are the steps. I have to...

...open a console & type...
>ifconfig eth0 up
>iwconfig eth0 essid 101 (that is if I using my wireless card)
>dhcpcd

...over and over and over, every time I boot. Let me add just one more twist before you have me hard code something in a file somewhere. I have (and use) about 4 different NICs and would like to switch between them - two different hard wired NICs and two different wireless NICs. None of the NICs I have show up on RH's networking GUI's so it doesn't seem to be an option to configure the cards there.

Now I hate to say this here, but in Windoze, it just works; switch a card, get and IP address, done. Is there anyway to make this a bit more automatic in Linux?

Thanks, W.

[rh0win]

Are these network cards all the same brand? Or are they different? normally if they were found by redhat 7.3 during the install it should have given you the option to select all trusted netowrking hardware for example eth0, eth1, eth2, etc. Were you able to see this during the installation?

[wswartz]

Three of the cards are newer 3Com cards, one is an Orninoco Silver. None of the cards were discovered by the default RH install. This is what I was trying to say when I mentioned that, "...None of the NICs I have show up on RH's networking GUI's..."

Thoughts?
W.