CentOS 7 Linux Minimal Install - ifconfig: command not found (let's use ip instead)

November 13, 2016

As someone who doesn't closely follow what's happening with Linux tools, I recently tried a minimal CentOS 7 install, and found out by chance that a command I use a lot on Windows has been deprecated in a number of Linux releases.

Not having run into this before, my first thought was to see if it was in the core repos.

yum provides ifconfig

y 00 yum provides

ifconfig is part of the net-tools package

Interestingly, ifconfig is part of the base repo within the net-tools package. So why wasn't it included, and is there an alternative - surely functionality like this should exist, even in the minimal install?

y 01 sbin

A scout of sbin provides two promising alternatives - if or ip perhaps?

It turns out that ifconfig (and the majority of the net-tools package) are obsolete and are being slowly removed from installs. Their replacement is iproute2, which provides the "ip" option spotted above - this new package allows support for more modern networking protocols, as it turns out net-tools hasn't really been updated for quite some time (see notes on arch linux, debian list, debian wiki).

So - unless you run other packages or apps that leverage net-tools functionality, use iproute2 - linux.com has a good summary of it's usage.


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From Dave, who writes to learn things. Thoughts and views are his own.

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