this has to be a bug...

[Paul Lussier]

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

>>   $ sudo /sbin/ifconfig eth0:0 del 10.107.33.189
>         [...]
>>I ask to delete a non-existent interface, and instead, I get
>>a totally new one I didn't ask for :)
>
>
> Though the results aren't what you wanted this might
> possibly be a case of RTFM; my man page says,
>
>  "To delete an alias interface use ifconfig eth0:0 down"

Could be, though *my* man page says nothing of the sort :)

The man page I have simply says:

    down   This flag causes the driver for this interface to be shut  down.

And at one time it was possible to down an interface, but not have it
be deleted.  That was essentially the difference between what
'ifconfig' and 'ifconfig -a' told you.  The -a gave you *all* the
interfaces which were configured, regardless of up or down state.
Simply using 'ifconfig' only told you about those which were up.

That's why I was using the 'del' syntax, which I discovered by looking
at code someone else had written 4 or 5 years ago to manage virtual
interfaces in a very consistent/predictable way based on the local
environment and how we use such things.  Things may have changed since
that code was written.

I note that *my* man page also says this:

        del addr/prefixlen
              Remove an IPv6 address from an interface.

My ifconfig at home comes from the net-tools 1.60-4 version (Debian).
This came up at work, I don't know which/whose ifconfig we're using
there, I didn't think to look at the time.

-- 

Seeya,
Paul