Network management

This article Article description::lists network management software to establish and manage network connections. Gentoo provides several tools for managing network connections. In addition, Gentoo provides tools for managing dialup modem connections and for managing wifi connections and network authentication.

Necessity
If you have emerged OpenRC without network support, i.e. with both USE flags and  disabled, you might need to set up a network manager such as net-misc/netifrc, net-misc/dhcpcd, net-misc/wicd, net-misc/networkmanager, or. Or, you have the option of emerging OpenRC with the use flag and configuring  and  if you only use static interfaces.

The easiest to use is dhcpcd. It has perfect integration for wpa_supplicant and automatically switches between wired and wireless connections. In case of using dhcpcd as network manager, the USE flags  and   may be deactivated in OpenRC.

Gentoo's standard however for network management is using Gentoo net.* scripts aka netifrc.

Comparison of provided functionality
Gentoo provides several tools for managing your network stack. Some perform overall management, while others mainly perform specific subfunctions, but may also perform overall management.

Comparison of network managers
There are different solutions for overall management of network connections. The differences between them are as such: