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There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc
241–250 of 270 posts
Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a good reminder that defaults should be simple and human readable. Advanced options should be behind flags for power users, not the other way around.
AFAICT these options are new(er) and making them the default would likely be a backwards-incompatible change. I can see how it would be an uphill battle to convince the maintainers to introduce what appears to be a breaking change. That said, a new alias that does trigger these new behaviors as defaults would be a sane compromise.
Just update ip to emulate ifconfig and netstat when called as such, like busybox does. Or all of those MTAs that ship with a sendmail command.
Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
MegaCLI (lsi hw raid control) sees your tc and raised you a few million awful flags.
After working with it almost daily for years I'm finally fluent in MegaCLI. I can even understand the --help for the most part. Time to get a new job I guess.
Nah.. Just time to relearn it all with StorCLI instead.
Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, sure, but assume you're new and you don't know that. You can usually search for "man ip" to get close, but that usually just gets you a technical reference for an experienced user (the man page) and not a tutorial, introduction, or training doc for someone learning a new tool. "ip command tutorial" works well, though the results are still rather mixed. I get Cisco and Windows results as well until I search "ip…
Not sure why you think I would disagree. I'd say that is exactly my opinion, so I wanted to share that googlable term with the other frustated people out there.
I don't think you'd disagree. I just think, "Well, you could search for iproute2," isn't that helpful because it's not that obvious that that is the package name.
Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc
#245I've never understood the purpose of IP aliases like the "secondary em0" the author is setting up with systemd.networkd. These aliases are practically useless, you cannot bind() to them without knowing the IP, you cannot use them in firewall rules, you cannot setup dhcp for them etc. What are people using them for? I'm not sure what the low level difference is between an alias like in the article, or a "eth0:1" type…
FreeBSD just lists those IPs under the interface.
Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. There's a simple solution to the lack of maintenance on ifconfig: Maintain ifconfig. There's no need to break shit.
It's open source. Feel free. I'd expect there are significant architectural differences between Linux and BSD by this point, though, that would make it quite a challenge. Alternately, it might be like adding major new features to Xorg: possible but extremely challenging.
My understanding is that the Linux version of net-tools was based on the BSD software, but I don't know how much code is actually shared between the two projects. It was intended to be syntactically equivalent and support the same features (at the time). You'd probably find it easier to write a net-tools-like wrapper for iproute2.
Yes, someone could have just extended net-tools. But nobody did. Instead, they wrote iwconfig and other tools when they were needed, and then someone decided to write a competing package, iproute2, that did everything. And that package added feature support when they were added them to the kernel, and bugs got fixed. Those didn't happen with net-tools unless each distro took care of it.
Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc
#247Well "replace" sounds very serious; but in fact iproute2 has been here long enough to have replaced stuff already. I didn't really consider myself to be a "grumpy old admin", but now I do, having used ip a lot back in 2003. I mean. 14 years have passed since I first used a mature! thing. And some people call ip fresh...
Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
That just shows its user-unfriendliness further. Here's a more readable version of the output: > ip route | column -t (With iproute2 4.3.0, I get the same output between "route", "route show", and "route show default"; no idea if it's changed since.)
Wow. That's actually kind of a tiny little brilliant gem that remains to be discovered by many. I, for one, had never though about trying this. Alas it doesn't work quite so well for "ip addr". It would have been great if they'd just decided on CSV or JSON or whatever and then relied on secondary utilities to go to "pretty-printed".
Somewhere else in here, someone else mentioned that "ip" has "--oneline", which does seem to work decently, at least for the first couple columns:
ip --oneline addr | column -tRe: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to say I would be a great fan of Linux, but I think at this point it's quite clear it's the huge winner of OSes. Nearly all servers run on it nowadays, I think all relevant smartphones (not sure though, correct me if that's wrong), many desktop/laptop computers and even Windows is integrating more and more with Linux. With such a dominance there is not much point in syncing changes of the standard with other OSes…
Yeah, the BSDs were the winner too at one point, so was Sun and even WindowsNT. Don't underestimate how fast it takes to fall from grace.
> Don't underestimate how fast it takes to fall from grace.
Fully agree.
> the BSDs were the winner too at one point
When was that point? Strong doubts about that.
Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to say I would be a great fan of Linux, but I think at this point it's quite clear it's the huge winner of OSes. Nearly all servers run on it nowadays, I think all relevant smartphones (not sure though, correct me if that's wrong), many desktop/laptop computers and even Windows is integrating more and more with Linux. With such a dominance there is not much point in syncing changes of the standard with other OSes…
Kernel won, userland didn't.
It's not the first time I hear it, but what is it supposed to mean? Is there a single thing that can be called "linux userland"? Also, I doubt that someone combines Linux kernel with Windows XP userland. So in some regard all userland tooling running on the linux kernel might be considered "linux userland".
If I understand the term userland correctly it is a term from kernel developers to say "this is code that doesn't run in the kernel", so it might not be helpful to any popularity discussion at all.