ip vs. if{up,down}

[Paul Lussier]

"Michael ODonnell" <michael.odonnell at comcast.net> writes:

> I'm wondering about the history of the various bits
> of network management infrastructure.  For example,
> sometimes I see ifup mentioned as the way to bring an
> interface up and sometimes I see "ip up" mentioned.
> Is there a reason to prefer one or the other?

I always thought the ifup/ifdown thing was a linuxism was little more
than a wrapper around ifconfig and the parsing of the interface config
files.  I don't ever remember using/seeing ifup/ifdown on any other
UNIX variant.  It's possible they were there and I just didn't know
about them.

The 'ip <command>' thing is actually from the iproute suite of tools,
and is in fact, an entirely new suite of networking tools specifically
for Linux kernels 2.2 and newer.  The project hope page is here:

  http://developer.osdl.org/dev/iproute2/

As for preferring one over the other, if you just want to bring an
interface up or down, then I don't think it matters.  The iproute
suite offers a lot more flexibility in controlling network traffic
though, and is meant to replace things like 'route' as well.
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
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