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:

All its configuration goes into but for most installations nothing needs to be done there, presumed that most computers nowadays are behind a router or access point providing DHCP. Though man 5 dhcpcd.conf will be helpful in case of advanced configuration demand.

Wireless
Dhcpcd comes with a built-in hook for wpa_supplicant, so it is best choice to install this for wireless. Note that the older versions (≤2.0-r2) of wpa_supplicant need "env wpa_supplicant_driver=nl80211" in.

Create the configuration file, put the content shown below, install wpa_supplicant and restart dhcpcd:

For any questions or problems with wpa_supplicant see the references.

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 the configuration file using the command line. The following is an example of manually adding a static address, routes and DNS by editing the appropriate configuration file using a text editor of choice:

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