ifconfig, wifi, and DHCP

[knowtree at aloha.com]

Usually my Lucent gold wifi card (wi0:) comes up fine when I start my
laptop (Dell Latitude D830, FreeBSD 7.0), but once in a while it doesn't,
and sometimes I forget to plug it in. Sometimes it does not join my home
network. I do ifconfig wi0: down, then ifconfig wi0: up, and it joins my
network but it does not pull an IP address from my access point. I looked
at the man pages for ifconfig and wi and found nothing about how this is done.

Here is a hint. When I installed my system and chose wifi networking the
installer wrote this in my rc.conf:

ifconfig_wi0="dhcp ssid Oz"

Yes, my network's name is Oz. No, I am not the wizard. Can I use this
quoted phrase when I invoke ifconfig manually? I see ssid documented on the
man page for ifconfig, but not dhcp.

Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project