on-board ethernet and mobility

Hi All,

I just got my Dell Inspiron 4100 last week and nearly finished
setting it up to work like my old Toshiba Libretto.  There's
however one issue that I might need some help with.

I used to travel around with my Libretto, sometimes connecting
to a network using a 3Com PCMCIA card, somtimes using a Cisco
Aironet card and sometimes not connecting at all.

My new Dell has this nice on-board 3Com 100 Mbit ethernet but
when I enter 'ifconfig_xl0="DHCP"' in my rc.conf booting will
stop at the point where xl0 gets configured if the on-board
ethernet is not connected.

I've been thinking to not configure xl0 from rc.network/rc.conf
but write my own script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d that puts dhclient
in the background but ideally I'd like to use the on-board
ethernet just like a PCMCIA interface: only start dhclient when
the cable is inserted and perhaps also dismantle the xl0 based
configuration when the cable gets disconnected.

Am I re-thinking something that already exists?
Am I completely lost and is there a better/more standard way to
accomplish true mobilitu with my on-board ethernet?
Any other thoughts?

Regards,

Paul Schenkeveld

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