I recently upgraded this Vaio to sarge from woody. It took a long time, but when it was finally installed, the network (the nic was a pcmcia card) wouldn't come up.

It took me forever to find this out, but apparently the scripts at /etc/pcmcia/network and /etc/pcmcia/network.opts are deprecated, i.e. they no longer work, in Debian. Instead the hotplug daemon is supposed to take care of bringing up a pcmcia network card. How, though, wasn't obvious. Eventually, I found the README file. It says:

  To ifup a network interface on hot plug, you must add the following 
   stanza to the /etc/network/interfaces file:
      mapping hotplug
          script echo
   This stanza will cause all hot-plugged interfaces to be
   ifupped. Note that you'll get the same results with 'all' option for
   NET_AGENT_POLICY.

   If you want only SOME interfaces to be ifupped, you can use a stanza like 
   the following, with each iface you do want ifupped listed on a separate 
   "map" line.
      mapping hotplug
          script grep
          map eth0
          map eth2

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