Quoting Taiidan@??? (Taiidan@???):

> What is so much better about the ifconfig replacement ip?

One, iproute2 is maintained. net-tools isn't.

Unmaintained key system tools are a security and reliability risk that
can IMO not be justified by merely not wanting to move on. IIRC,
net-tools has been orphaned since 2003.


Two, the iproute2 tools are lighter-weight than the net-tools ones,
on account of using netlink instead of procfs and ioctl.


Three, UI is more intuitive. (Yes, you say you are already used to
what you're familiar with. I used to say this about nslookup.)
The various iproute2 tools have a consistent syntax and are
scripting-friendly.


Four, iproute2's ip command can add/manage/display multiple IP addresses
on a single interface. net-tools can only semi-approach this
functionality via IP aliasing.

The 'display' functionality of the net-tools toolkit is particularly
broken in that department. 'ifconfig eth0' will show only one IP
address. 'ip addr show dev eth0' will show all of them.


Reason number 1 is sufficient, IMO.


> Why should I learn how to use yet another tool that has no tangible
> benefit but is being foisted on me?

Why do you make this claim without bothering to do your homework?

> Would I be correct in guessing it is made by red-hat?

Current maintainer: Stephen Hemminger
Original developer: Alexey Kuznetsov

Hemminger was formerly at embedded networking firm Vyatta (previously
InterTrust, Passedge, Informix, nCube, Sequent, and Tektronix), and is
now Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft Corporation.

Alexay is Chief Software Engineer at Parallels, Inc. Before that, he
was at IceRock Development, Alawar Digital, Alawar Entertainment Inc.,
and my firm VA Linux System, Inc.