How come I never heard of "ip"?!

FUBAR · 2006-09-21 12:56:06

I'm currently studying Novell's "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Administration" and the tool "ip" is explained. When I saw its use I thought: hah, just another lame frontend to ifconfig and route written by Novell. But it seems I was horribly wrong, apparently it's the successor to those tools and has been around for quite a while now.

How come I've never seen anyone mention it?! Not on any forum, in any wiki or howto or on IRC! I feel so stupid having learnt something from a SUSE manual. :'(

ralvez · 2006-09-21 13:35:09

You are correct in that ip has been around for awhile now and it is supposed to be the "next generation" ifconfig, however ... ip has some shortcomings of its own.
For instance type

ip addr

and compare the results to

ifconfig

or even

ip route

compared to

route

See ... is a more "messy" way to display the same information :? and people tend to stick to what they are familiar with.

I personally, am aware of ip but find no compelling reason to use it over ifconfig

Arch has ip and if you type man ip you will find all the information you may need to use it.

Hope this helps.

iphitus · 2006-09-21 14:15:13

ip looks like what they use in OpenBSD...

funny, i'd never realised it was there either.

James

tomk · 2006-09-21 15:04:13

ip is often used by other applications, so its output is parsed somewhere in the background instead of displayed for numan consumption. Openswan is a good example of this.

soloport · 2006-09-21 17:00:30

FUBAR wrote:

I feel so stupid having learnt something from a SUSE manual. :'(

I don't see why. Novel offers pretty decent information. For example thier book, "Linux Kernel Development" was an excellent introduction to the title's topic. I can say I've learned a lot from Novel -- though I've never used any of their products.

zen_guerrilla · 2006-09-21 22:41:05

iphitus wrote:

ip looks like what they use in OpenBSD...
funny, i'd never realised it was there either.

Slightly OT: OpenBSD uses the traditional UNIX tools: ifconfig & route. ip is strictly Linux-based. An example:

$ uname -sr && ip addr show lo
Linux 2.4.34-pre2
1: lo: <LOOPBACK> mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue 
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 brd 127.255.255.255 scope host lo

$ uname -sr && ifconfig lo
OpenBSD 3.8
lo0: flags=8049<UP> mtu 33224
        groups: lo 
        inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 
        inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
        inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x6

iphitus · 2006-09-21 23:50:59

ah ok. yeah the output of ip seemed like ifconfig on obsd, so i assumed they'd made the switch.

obsd4 ftw!

James

JGC · 2006-09-22 11:40:35

ip can do things not possible with ifconfig and route. Try setting up policy routing with route, I don't think you'll find a way how to do that.

tomk · 2006-09-22 12:08:29

Also, ip does tunnels, in 3 different flavours - ipip, GRE, and sit.

FUBAR · 2006-09-25 14:39:13

For now, ip is too l33t for me. I hope to find a use for it in the (near) future.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-09-21 12:56:06

How come I never heard of "ip"?!

#2 2006-09-21 13:35:09

Re: How come I never heard of "ip"?!

#3 2006-09-21 14:15:13

Re: How come I never heard of "ip"?!

#4 2006-09-21 15:04:13

Re: How come I never heard of "ip"?!

#5 2006-09-21 17:00:30

Re: How come I never heard of "ip"?!

#6 2006-09-21 22:41:05

Re: How come I never heard of "ip"?!

#7 2006-09-21 23:50:59

Re: How come I never heard of "ip"?!

#8 2006-09-22 11:40:35

Re: How come I never heard of "ip"?!

#9 2006-09-22 12:08:29

Re: How come I never heard of "ip"?!

#10 2006-09-25 14:39:13

Re: How come I never heard of "ip"?!

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