My question: why are there so many different procedures which must be called in order to get on a network? Is there any general description of what is involved? What is the difference between dhclient and dhcpcd, or between ifconfig and iwconfig?

Background: when I got my wireless server up and talking to the router, it was still not on the internet. Serg.kr suggested I still needed to get an IP address. He suggested "dhclient", which did not work, but an attempt with "dhcpcd" did work. To my recollection, neither of these programs was mentioned in the installation procedure for my wireless driver.

--By no means disapproving of anything; just trying to learn.

dhclient is a DHCP client. dhcpcd is a DHCP server, and you don't need a DHCP server running on your machine to get on the network (so I don't know what you did that made it work). ifconfig is the interface config tool. iwconfig is the same thing but meant for wireless interfaces. Being able to get an IP is assumed by the wireless driver instructions.

You must have overlooked the "c" in the name. While dhclient is the DHCP client provided by ISC's DHCP package, dhcpcd is indeed an alternative DHCP client. Gentoo's website has a page that briefly lists some pros and cons of each.

er, I did. thanks.

The comments above were helpful.

Apparently there will be several similar programs to handle a given type of action, which may vary depending perhaps on physical device types. But I still think of the networking software as being fragmented. If the purpose of a driver is to mediate between the physical device and the user program, why, when I load a driver for a particular device, is the driver not ready for I/O traffic from the user program?

this is one place where what distro your running matters