This was not obvious for me and didn’t seem to be well documented, so mostly as a note to myself, when creating gif devices on FreeBSD 5, just do something like this:

ifconfig gif create

In previous releases of FreeBSD, it was automatically created for you and sort of sat there doing nothing. Other differences is that when configuring the interface you would do:

ifconfig gif0 tunnel a.b.c.d e.f.g.h

instead of using:

gifconfig