Network management using DHCPCD

This article is about using OpenRC with DHCPCD as network manager. It is based on a posting in Gentoo Forums.

Setup
Have dhcpcd installed, then add it to the default runlevel and start the service:

Wireless
Dhcpcd comes with a built-in hook for wpa_supplicant, so it is best choice to install this for wireless. After installation of wpa_supplicant restart dhcpcd:

For any questions or problems with wpa_supplicant see the reference. or the handbook.

Static IP address
In case the network interface card should be configured with a static IP address, type it into the Graphical User interface. Without the Graphical User interface, entries can also be manually added to as described in Dhcpcd.

Migration from Gentoo net.* scripts
In case of migration from Gentoo net.* scripts it's essential to remove wpa_supplicant and the net.* scripts from the runlevels.

Any lines starting with "net." must not have a runlevel assigned. In this example, it's net.wlp8s0 to be removed.

Once the network setup works well you might want to completely remove the old Gentoo net.* scripts setup. So disable the netifrc useflag, re-emerge OpenRC without and unmerge netifrc:

Also the old config files and symlinks can be removed