At long last... (or: How'd I miss that so long?)

[vakkotaur]

I am writing this, and posting it as well, from a motel in Cedar Rapids that only has wireless access - no places to plug in an ethernet cable. I finally managed to get wireless networking to connect away from home. The big problem all along? A password. The network at home uses one, the networks at hotels do not. Once that was taken care of, and rc.wireless.conf made to be what it should (I still don't quite trust iwconfig to work as advertised) things started working.