I was trying to show my network configuration by /sbin/ifconfig. I have discovered If config hadn’t been installed on my system I must install special package to get ifconfig back. My question is: Is ifconfig been dropped? I didn’t find any information about that.
It is depricated.
In 13.2 there is the package net-tools, which provides ifconfig and more of the depricated tools.
Hello,
+1
Some replacements: Deprecated Linux networking commands and their replacements | Doug Vitale Tech Blog.
In Tumbleweed, deprecated tools – ifconfig, arp, netstat, route – have been removed from net-tools. They are in net-tools-deprecated now.
Regards,
Antoine
cnf is telling me iconfig is in package ipmiutil.
I want to learn how to use the new tools: ip, iw. What concerns me is that most of the instructions on how to set up a network still use iconfig. I don’t want to go back to it, I just want to learn to use the newer tools. My wireless Broadcom requires iw to work.
But iconfig is something completely different.
This is about ifconfig.
ifconfig has been moved to the package “net-tools-deprecated”, which is not installed by default: (as has been mentioned already)
http://software.opensuse.org/package/net-tools-deprecated
But you shouldn’t use it anyway.
What concerns me is that most of the instructions on how to set up a network still use iconfig.
Do you mean iconfig or ifconfig now?
I never used ifconfig at all to set up a network. (and iconfig neither)
On openSUSE, you can just use YaST anyway.
As has been mentioned, ipconfig is deprecated since years (since Kernel 2.0!), and it has bugs and limitations.
E.g. it only supports device names upto 8 characters, and therefore often does not work at all any more with the new names.
So it got removed from the default installation recently.
iconfig is something different. If some instructions use iconfig, it’s probably for good reasons.
IPMI=Intelligent Platform Management Interface.
On 2015-06-15 10:16, wolfi323 wrote:
> As has been mentioned, ipconfig is deprecated since years (since Kernel
> 2.0!), and it has bugs and limitations.
ipconfig? That’s on Windows. On Linux it is (was) ifconfig 
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
Yes, I meant ifconfig. I needed to use the commandline to install the wireless driver. It turns out I only needed to install b43 and iw and then use YaST, but I messed about much more than that before figuring that out. At first I thought I needed to edit wpa_supplicant.conf. Now that I look at my notes, iwconfig was used alot. I can’t be expected to notice one little letter, can I?
Right, that was a typo. I did write ifconfig in the rest of the post…
I never needed to install iw manually as well. But then, I don’t use Tumbleweed.
And I don’t think it’s actually needed for wireless. Although I think YaST insists on it being installed when you want to setup the connection.
You probably could just have switched to NetworkManager too.
b43 is included in the kernel package, no need to install that manually. You probably mean the firmware?
At first I thought I needed to edit wpa_supplicant.conf. Now that I look at my notes, iwconfig was used alot. I can’t be expected to notice one little letter, can I?
Well, but the system notices it.
installing ipmi-tools won’t help if you want to use ifconfig.
And iwconfig is something completely different as well.
Yes I did mean install the firmware. That won’t happen automatically for legal reasons. YaST might install iw automatically. When I opened YaST I got an error message stating that I need iw in order to configure my wireless driver. Even at the time I realized that iw was new and my computer is new. So that must be why. Of course maybe it is because my operating system is new.
Yes, the firmware cannot be shipped for legal reasons.
But that’s mainly a problem with broadcom chips.
YaST might install iw automatically. When I opened YaST I got an error message stating that I need iw in order to configure my wireless driver.
Yes, I think there is or was a problem with that in Tumbleweed.
IIRC, iw is not on the installation medium or is just not installed by default.
But, if the installer detects a wireless device, it should automatically enable NetworkManager anyway. This only works if the wireless device doesn’t need any additional driver or firmware though.
Even at the time I realized that iw was new and my computer is new. So that must be why. Of course maybe it is because my operating system is new.
No, not really.
iw is definitely not “new”, and it only makes sense with WLAN devices. And how new your computer is shouldn’t matter at all in this regard.
Anyway, that’s all way off-topic now.
The OP specifically asked about ifconfig not being available.
If you have questions about the other tools available, open a new thread.
Yup, most pointless deprecation of the century so far.
So you want to do new and fancy things with your interfaces? Want to write a new tool for that? Cool. Congratulations on ip.
Meanwhile, people actually using this stuff for a living may have to rely on scripts and documentation that is either a few decades old or not specific to Linux (many systems falling under the categories “not broken: don’t touch” and “really expensive if it goes down”).
One thing is not wanting to be bothered with maintaining old code (though I wonder if that’s even been attempted), but quite another to drop something which does the job perfectly well for those people who actually use it.
It may also be me, but I have never managed to remember the syntax of ip, and that’s even without being under pressure when something goes wrong and we need the network back up immediately. In all its simplicity, ifconfig does all you need it to do 99% of the time:
- Is the network there? (ifconfig)
- Bring it up (ifconfig eth0 up)
- Shut it down (ifconfig eth0 down)
Yes, I know you can go “ip link set eth0 up” and stuff, that’s not the point (and neither is the point the unnecessary verbosity of that: why the extra two semantically useless words?). The point is, leave the other method alone–if people want to switch to your fancy tool, let them do so on the merits of your tool, not on trying to round up a captive audience.
On 2015-06-28 00:26, licehunter wrote:
> One thing is not wanting to be bothered with maintaining old code
> (though I wonder if that’s even been attempted), but quite another to
> drop something which does the job perfectly well for those people who
> actually use it.
ifconfig is broken beyond repair. One of the people involved in this
change said when I asked about it:
+++—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-
On Wednesday 10 of June 2015 05:02:36 Carlos E. R. wrote:
> But are they broken? As far as I know, they work.
Depends on your definition of “broken”. From the top of my head, I have
recently seen:
- ifconfig silently truncating interface names
- netstat unable to cope with socket inode numbers >= 2^32
- hostname -f and -i broken if hostname has only an IPv6 address
The, of course, the well known (but largely ignored) fact that ifconfig
syntax and semantics is based on model abandoned in kernel 2.1 and
poorly emulated since. In a similar fashion, route can see and handle
only small part of the routing configuration. And, perhaps most funny,
rarp has absolutely no chance of working since the kernel RARP code was
dropped in 2.3.
> If they are still available as an extra, non default package, we can
> install and use it. Not being a default package, things that miss the
> tools will be corrected, and we can adapt our local scripts with time.
While I believe most of net-tools should have been gone long ago, just
dropping it out of the blue would be too harsh and too disruptive. On
the other hand, it should no longer be included in the default
installation or standard patterns.
Michal Kubeček
—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-+±
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))
Ranting about it here in a help forum is pointless. It’s not recent news anyway, and it’s not specific to openSUSE, or any other distro for that matter.
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/iproute2
I’d been reading for about 4 years now that Linux was going to drop ifconfig in favor of the iproute2 utilities.
It’s not loke there hasn’t been plenty of warning and discussion, or maybe there has been so much that people started losing interest in the warnings.
TSU
What makes you think it is not available?
On 2015-06-28 08:56, arvidjaar wrote:
>
> licehunter;2717137 Wrote:
>> The point is, leave the other method alone
>
> What makes you think it is not available?
Because zypper removes the package on update, so it “disappears”. You
have to intentionally search and install another package, named
something like old, obsolete, deprecated… dunno, I don’t remember but
I can find out. Lazy here, but you surely follow my meaning :-))
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))
Those hardly look like insurmountable problems. I would have expected people actually paid to work on this to be able to either make the necessary changes to ifconfig, or rewrite it from scratch while maintaining a compatible user interface. Not doing either is rather unprofessional.
What’s going to happen when it turns out that “ip” does not support whichever new fancy tech will appear in a few years’ time? They will write yet another tool with a completely different syntax?
Do note Michal’s last paragraph, btw. As I pointed out above, in the present circumstances I would agree with no new installs, but removing it during an upgrade when it’s just gone into a different package is fairly idiotic.
Yup. But it’s also worth pointing out that the RPM spec allows you to do that automatically. I can’t recall the actual statement but it’s something like “Obsoletes: blah” or some such. So the package containing “ifconfig” could have been installed automatically during upgrade, if and only if ifconfig &al were present.
From that point of view, this is a packaging issue and therefore specific to openSUSE, contrary to what deano says.
I should also like to mention that there is a difference between something being no longer maintained or supported (i.e., deprecated), and forcefully removing it from a working system.
On 06/28/2015 04:46 PM, licehunter wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2717141 Wrote:
>>
>> - ifconfig silently truncating interface names
>> - netstat unable to cope with socket inode numbers >= 2^32
>> - hostname -f and -i broken if hostname has only an IPv6 address
>>
>
> Those hardly look like insurmountable problems. I would have expected
> people actually paid to work on this to be able to either make the
> necessary changes to ifconfig, or rewrite it from scratch while
> maintaining a compatible user interface. Not doing either is rather
> unprofessional.
>
And where do you read that the people working on openSUSE, or other
distributions of linux, are are all paid professionals? They’re not!
Most are just plain folks volunteering their time. And it has been
announced for over a year that ifconfig was going to be dropped.
Ken
On 2015-06-28 22:46, licehunter wrote:
> Do note Michal’s last paragraph, btw. As I pointed out above, in the
> present circumstances I would agree with no new installs, but removing
> it during an upgrade when it’s just gone into a different package is
> fairly idiotic.
As I just posted on another thread: «it was intentionally removed “from
working systems” in order to cause the things that would break if the
tools were removed, to actually break now, in tumbleweed, where
development is made, in order to react to those breakages, either
reverting the change, repairing breaks and going ahead, whatever.»
So certainly not idiotic. The decision was announced, discussed, and
then implemented.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))