It has bothered us a lot since GNU inetutils was released that its ifconfig utility is not command-line compatible with ifconfig on many other systems, including GNU/Linux, Solaris, *BSD, IRIX, OSF, Mac OS X, ...
Today, we discovered a nasty problem, documented in these notes: >> ... >> After installation of >> >> ifconfig (GNU inetutils) 1.7 >> >> on 18-Dec-2009, and a routine reboot after system updates on >> 25-Jan-2010, ubuntu came up without a network interface. >> >> Neither powercycling the machine, nor backing off to an older >> kernel, fixed the problem. >> >> Nothing in /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, or /usr/sbin seemed to have anything >> to do with the hardware problem, and the kernel had not been updated >> since 1-Dec-2009. >> >> The fix proved to be to rename /usr/local/bin/ifconfig to >> /usr/local/bin/ifconfig.bad, and reboot. ubuntu unfortunately puts >> /usr/local/sbin and /usr/local/bin ahead of /bin and /usr/bin in PATH, >> and since the GNU ifconfig is incompatible with the standard one, it >> is clearly disastrous to have it used at boot time. >> ... We feel rather strongly that the GNU inetutils ifconfig should either be renamed, or made to be command-line compatible with ifconfig programs that have been in use for decades on Unix systems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: be...@math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 be...@acm.org be...@computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
