Networkdevice configuration: reboot necessary?

[Lane]

On Sunday 10 December 2006 17:05, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> Karl Sinn wrote:
> > I went on with the configuration of my first FreeBSD computer. And I
> > found something amazing:
> >
> > After the configuration of the network device with sysinstall the network
> > did not work immediately.
> > In the handbook it is written to reboot after configuration.
>
> Hmmm... sysinstall will usually prompt you to bring up a network interface
> after you've filled out the appropriate menu stuff.
>
> What sysinstall is doing behind the scenes is rewriting the settings in
> /etc/rc.conf.  As you've discovered, that only has any effect when running
> the scripts in /etc/rc.d (or /usr/local/etc/rc.d) -- ie. generally when
> rebooting.  In fact, what sysinstall does is append new settings to the
> end of rc.conf, confusingly leaving the old ones still at the top of the
> file. You would be well advised (for the sake of your own sanity, if
> nothing else) to learn how to edit rc.conf directly to make such
> configuration changes, plus keep the file trimmed of old entries and
> extraneous fluff.
>
> > Is this really necessary?
> > Is there no other way to change the configuration without turning of the
> > computer?
>
> Of course there is.  You just run ifconfig from the command line,
> like you would with any other unix system.  Of course, that pre-supposes
> you know what to put onto the ifconfig command line: the ifconfig(8)
> manual page is a good place to start.
>
> 	Cheers,
>
> 	Matthew
Maybe

/etc/rc.d/netif restart

is a quick way to apply the configuration changes in /etc/rc.conf.

Of course nothing is as good as knowing ifconfig(8) ... and one day I will 
scratch that off my "to do" list :)

lane