wifi & dhcp

[John Nielsen]

On Tuesday 05 December 2006 13:21, Steve Franks wrote:
> Ok, we're losin our minds here. Me and a friend just bought up no less
> than 4 boxes (server, 2 laptops, and a net-device) in about 2 weeks on
> stable 6.1.  My first foray into bsd since '95, and I'm way-pleased.
> One little problem: every one of them loses it's connection (aka ip)
> when the wifi goes out and comes back, forcing us to 'dhclient xx0'
> incessantly.  Note we're talking a belkin ath, an ativa ath, a wavelan
> wi and a linksys wi, not all the same card or even driver.
>
> Someone on current said, 'it's probably a problem with the driver's
> link-state handling' -  whatever.  Oh, yeah, we've got one set on a
> dlink ap, and the other on a linksys.  Both are running wep for legacy
> reasons, which I have a sinking feeling may be a contributing factor.

I see the same behavior (using an older wi(4) card). I haven't done much 
experimenting with it though since my house isn't that big and I don't lose 
my link that often. A couple things I would suggest trying, though:

Add a "killall dhclient" somewhere in your boot process. Not ideal for some 
circumstances, but if you only plan to be on one logical wireless network for 
a given session then it shouldn't hurt anything.

Try using the net/isc-dhcp3-client port instead of the base system's dhclient. 
E.g.:
	cd /usr/ports/net/isc-dhcp3-client && make install clean
	echo 'dhclient_program="/usr/local/sbin/dhclient"' >> /etc/rc.conf

If you have/use a dhclient.conf file you'll also need to either move it 
to /usr/local/etc or add 'dhclient_flags="-c /etc/dhclient.conf"' 
to /etc/rc.conf.

Good luck!

JN