Wireless setup and SYNCDHCP

[ronaldlees]

Hi.

For years I have been using a special wireless startup script. It doesn't bother me, and I never considered it an inconvenience. Recently, a friend indicated that FreeBSD might be interesting, and I set about to create a completely setup-transparent WiFi access netbook computer. Finally, I think I'm there (Windows, move over). The wpa_gui works great, although I hated to go to ports and install sudo for it. Any other ideas for wpa_gui?

The only thing that caused an issue, was when I transmuted my old startup script to the loader.conf, rc.conf, et al files. It concerned the functionality of the following lines in rc.conf,

wlans_ndis0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA DHCP"

Seemingly, it worked well enough, except that I found it was necessary to run dhclient manually after the gdm login. A friend (without my inclinations) would be seriously put off by anything manual, so I thought about a "bandaid" script. (No ...no...no...no ) Finally, I found everything works just automagically if I use:

wlans_ndis0="wlan0"
ifconfig wlan0="WPA SYNCDHCP"

Apparently, the dhclient task does not continue otherwise? Anyway, this cost me a bit of messing around, so I thought it'd be useful for others ...

 

[wblock@]

By default, the startup scripts do not wait for dhclient(8) to finish, they just continue while it runs in the background. Some network interfaces or DHCP servers are slow, and don't get a lease in time for the startup scripts that need it.

SYNCDHCP forces the startup to wait until dhclient(8) returns. Personally, I think it should be the default, and always use it.

 

[ronaldlees]

By default, the startup scripts do not wait for dhclient(8) to finish, they just continue while it runs in the background. Some network interfaces or DHCP servers are slow, and don't get a lease in time for the startup scripts that need it.

SYNCDHCP forces the startup to wait until dhclient(8) returns. Personally, I think it should be the default, and always use it.

Thanks!

BTW, I see a typo on my last line. Should be

ifconfig_wlan0="WPA SYNCDHCP"