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There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

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Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#161

Post by amyjess »

Karunamon wrote: post #124

As I opened this article, I thought "I bet this is going to be related to some Goddamned systemd change". And sure enough, about halfway through: > This interface has an IP alias, set up through systemd's networkd. The amount of pain and headache this init-kitchen-sink-wannabe- thing has caused me day-to-day is incalculable.

Multiple IP addresses on an interface have been a thing since long before systemd existed.

I remember using iproute2 to add multiple IP addresses to devices at my very first job in 2007. systemd didn't even come out until 2010.

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#162

Post by felixgallo »

xtrapolate wrote: post #95
sureaboutthis wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. The article speaks of old software but, instead of fixing what it has and being standards compliant, it chooses to break away and do its own thing along with the new bugs and other issues which will surely arise.

> "instead of fixing what it has and being standards compliant, it chooses to break away and do its own thing along with the new bugs and other issues which will surely arise." Well, people are still free to maintain and improve those older tools and bring them up to par with newer standards, if they want to. Others would argue it's time to start phasing out code and so-called "standards" we've had since the early 90…

"others" would be right, but the present team doing the refactoring is actively, aggressively incompetent, doesn't listen to even constructive feedback, closes critical bugs with snarky comments, refuses outside contributions, claim outside contributions are literally impossible, and absorbs independent functionality in the name of empire building.

So the notional idea of 'refactoring' being better -- yes! But with the constraint being that the people doing the refactoring have to be at least as wise, tasteful, mature, sensible, and thoughtful as the people who came before.

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#163

Post by nailer »

kashyapc wrote: post #143
djsumdog wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like systemctl and journalctl are the same way. They are terrible commands with awful usability. Having a full process control system is nice and helpful when writing a package once for several platforms, but I wish something had caught on that had better usability and didn't try to do everything from login management to filesystem mounting, but rather just process management. Where as someone could probably w…

Are they really "terrible" with "awful usability"? In my day-to-day debugging, I do find `journalctl` much better. Let's see a couple of quick examples: - Show logs for the current boot: $ journalctl -b - To get all errors that are of priority level ERROR and worse: $ journalctl -b -p err - Show me logs for a given binary: $ journalctl /usr/sbin/libvirtd - Or via its unit file: $ journalctl -u libvirtd -l - Want to q…

I quite like journalctl, but the naming could be better. 'system' means OS, and kernel, and init system, and computer, and many other things. 'start-service' would have been better.

The worst is 'system-cat' to send a log message (SysVInit used 'logger'). Why not just 'log'?

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#164

Post by nailer »

vidarh wrote: post #102
linuxguy2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are people using them for? In my case, keepalived VRRP floating addresses.

I've used eth0:xx style aliases for that for a decade with no problem. Do you know what the difference is?

Dont know, but when I used to do index arb trading they had vlans on virtual IPs on bonds and ifconfig simply couldn't show the addresses. 'ip' could

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#165

Post by aade »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #142
djsumdog wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like systemctl and journalctl are the same way. They are terrible commands with awful usability. Having a full process control system is nice and helpful when writing a package once for several platforms, but I wish something had caught on that had better usability and didn't try to do everything from login management to filesystem mounting, but rather just process management. Where as someone could probably w…

systemd has decided for you that these commands are better. It is now your responsibility to accept their decisions.

For so it is written.

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#167

Post by xtrapolate »

felixgallo wrote: post #162
xtrapolate wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "instead of fixing what it has and being standards compliant, it chooses to break away and do its own thing along with the new bugs and other issues which will surely arise." Well, people are still free to maintain and improve those older tools and bring them up to par with newer standards, if they want to. Others would argue it's time to start phasing out code and so-called "standards" we've had since the early 90…

"others" would be right, but the present team doing the refactoring is actively, aggressively incompetent, doesn't listen to even constructive feedback, closes critical bugs with snarky comments, refuses outside contributions, claim outside contributions are literally impossible, and absorbs independent functionality in the name of empire building. So the notional idea of 'refactoring' being better -- yes! But with t…

Do I have to state the obvious? This is an open source effort. Not all attempts at persuasion bear fruit. If you feel you are being ignored (by what would appear is a group of maintainers you absolutely despise), I guess the other option would be to fork the repo. This would not be the first time in history people split code over disagreements.

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#168

Post by davidcuddeback »

da_chicken wrote: post #114
ptx wrote: post #69

So, to summarize, ifconfig has to be replaced because it relies on the /proc filesystem and it doesn't handle aliases? This is easily disproven: ifconfig on FreeBSD doesn't rely on /proc and handles aliases just fine. It sounds a bit like the whole OSS/ALSA discussion – some argued that ALSA was needed to replace OSS because OSS didn't support muxing multiple simultaneous audio streams, but strangely OSS on FreeBSD d…

BSD's ifconfig isn't really related to Linux's ifconfig anymore because BSD has continued development and the Linux fork or version (don't remember which it is anymore) hasn't. Linux's ifconfig is a part of net-tools ( http://net-tools.sourceforge.net/ ) and the latest release of net-tools, v1.6, was released in April 2001. It's been unmaintained for over 17 years. Some distros began deprecating ifconfig when the Lin…

> It's been unmaintained for over 17 years.

So is the Linux ecosystem just going to rewrite tools everytime their original developer moves on or passes away? It's going to happen more in the future, so are we going to see more and more rewrites in Linux?

There's something to be said about the BSD approach of maintaining the OS (kernel + userland) as a whole. They don't seem to have this problem.

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#169

Post by [deleted] »

isostatic wrote: post #146
kees99 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When asking "what's the default gateway?", more often than not, the real question you have is "what's the gateway to IP address X", which would be: ip route get X

No it's not, it's usually "What is the default gateway on this network segment because I want to plug my laptop in" I do use ip route a fair bit - if I have a machine connected to two (or more) network segments and want to ensure traffic gets routed back the way it came However my main criticism for "ip route" is that it's inconsistent and a change route "route" "route" does reverse dns lookups - e.g "my.server.tld r…

[deleted]

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#170

Post by yarrel »

kashyapc wrote: post #143
djsumdog wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like systemctl and journalctl are the same way. They are terrible commands with awful usability. Having a full process control system is nice and helpful when writing a package once for several platforms, but I wish something had caught on that had better usability and didn't try to do everything from login management to filesystem mounting, but rather just process management. Where as someone could probably w…

Are they really "terrible" with "awful usability"? In my day-to-day debugging, I do find `journalctl` much better. Let's see a couple of quick examples: - Show logs for the current boot: $ journalctl -b - To get all errors that are of priority level ERROR and worse: $ journalctl -b -p err - Show me logs for a given binary: $ journalctl /usr/sbin/libvirtd - Or via its unit file: $ journalctl -u libvirtd -l - Want to q…

Yes that is an awful soup of switches that should either be separate commands or usages of existing Unix tools.
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