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
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?
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.
