[sle-beta] Network missing pieces

[Richard Brown]

On 2017-11-05 16:26, Joe Doupnik wrote:
>     Perhaps this has been discussed previously and I missed it, but I
> found two major network components are missing: commands to support
> ifconfig and netstat. I have utilities which depend upon them, plus
> humans and their habits.

Hi Joe!

Those tools (along with arp and route) have long been deprecated and 
should be substituted with their modern equivalents from the iproute2 
package

       * arp -> ip [-r] neigh
       * ifconfig -> ip a
       * netstat -> ss [-r]
       * route -> ip r

If you really, really, really want to continue to use the old 
unsupported tools I think SLE 15 has the 'net-tools-deprecated' package 
which will install them, but the package description gives the same 
recommendation as above.

>     Further, we seem to be repeating the mistake of naming Ethernet
> interfaces in weird style, a matter which we thrashed out in SLES 12
> some time ago. That means I expect to see eth0, eth1, rather than
> whimsical creations.

The new interface naming is not 'whimsical' but solves real problems. I 
for one quite like the fact that I now have stable device naming 
regardless of tinkering with VM configurations, adding/removing cards on 
real hardware, etc etc

A simple 'lspci' is all I need now to predictively create configuration 
required for a card, whereas with the previous model I could never be 
100% certain my scripted 'eth0' configurations would land on the CORRECT 
card on the system.

It's compatibility with a read-only root filesystem is also a boon for 
the work we're doing with CaaSP and Kubic. I'm quite sick of the bugs I 
have in Kubic right now because we haven't yet implemented this there as 
effectively as you see in the SLE-15 beta.

There's a lot more information about this on the Freedesktop.org site:

  
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/PredictableNetworkInterfaceNames/

Hope this helps,
-- 
Richard Brown
Linux Distribution Engineer - Future Technology Team
Chairman - openSUSE

Phone +4991174053-361
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