we have covered some useful command line networking utilities for Sysadmin’s for network management, troubleshooting and debugging on Linux. We mentioned some networking commands that are still included and supported in many Linux distributions, but are now, in reality, deprecated or obsoleted and therefore should be carry out in favor of more present-day replacements.
Although these networking tools/utilities are still available in official repositories of mainstream Linux distributions, but they do not actually come pre-installed by default.
This is evident in Enterprise Linux distributions, a number of popular networking commands no longer work on RHEL/CentOS 7, while they actually work on RHEL/CentOS 6. Latest Debian and Ubuntu releases don’t include them as well. These commands include ifconfig, netstat, arp, iwconfig, iptunnel, nameif, as well as route.
All the listed programs with exception of iwconfig are found in the net-tools package which has not been under active maintenance for so many years.
Importantly, you should keep in mind that “unmaintained software is dangerous”, it poses a great security risk to your Linux system. The modern replacement for net-tools is iproute2 – an assortment of utilities for controlling TCP/IP networking in Linux.
The following table shows the summary of the exact deprecated commands and their replacements, that you should take note of.
| Linux Deprecated Commands | Linux Replacement Commands |
|---|---|
| arp | ip n (ip neighbor) |
| ifconfig | ip a (ip addr), ip link, ip -s (ip -stats) |
| iptunnel | ip tunnel |
| iwconfig | iw |
| nameif | ip link, ifrename |
| netstat | ss, ip route (for netstat -r), ip -s link (for netstat -i), ip maddr (for netstat -g) |
| route | ip r (ip route) |
