phil freeman writes:
> i have a second network card in my machine... it is detected by the
> kernel but aparently it looks for /etc/ifconfig.<dev name>?? can anyone
> point me toward some examples on the format of this config file ? or
> maybe post them ?

you can easily figure this out by reading /etc/rc and the scripts that 
it calls, like /etc/rc.conf and /etc/netstart

The code you are looking for in particular is just a bit of shell in
/etc/netstart that invokes ifconfig on the given interface with the
contents of the file in question

man rc
man rc.conf
man ifconfig
man init

Perry