The Lubuntu 17.04 Desktop/Live CD(ISO) is missing the package: net-tools[1]
It's troubling to find a LiveCD today that does not have something as simple as netstat and other important tools available.
It's also quite pathetic to discover the recent Debian LiveCDs are missing UFW[2].
[1] "This package includes the important tools for controlling the network subsystem of the Linux kernel. This includes arp, ifconfig, netstat, rarp, nameif and route."
[2] "The Uncomplicated FireWall is a front-end for iptables, to make managing a Netfilter firewall easier. It provides a command line interface with syntax similar to OpenBSD's Packet Filter. It is particularly well-suited as a host-based firewall."
[Ed note: Assuming one has an internet connection, can't one just do something along the lines of apt-get $package_name to fill in what is missing? Is this just whining on the part of the submitter or an actual shortcoming? What are your thoughts on this?]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Monday June 12 2017, @12:00PM (34 children)
then you better hope the network works out of the box so you can apt-get. Not including ifconfig is a pretty brain dead move.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday June 12 2017, @12:06PM (7 children)
Now I'm wondering how the system sets up the networking. What does it do that a user can't do? Is it some systemd thing? I really do not know, but find it quite interesting.
I know I'd be a hurting unit if I didn't have ifconfig.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2, Informative) by linuxrocks123 on Monday June 12 2017, @12:13PM (2 children)
The situation isn't related to SystemD. See my post below.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday June 12 2017, @12:36PM (1 child)
That is unless of course lubuntu doesn't include network manager and instead only uses systemd-networkd (I do not know I don't use lubuntu.)
http://xmodulo.com/switch-from-networkmanager-to-systemd-networkd.html [xmodulo.com]
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:14PM
Network Manager isn't the alternative. From what other posters have posted, it appears to be iproute2.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Monday June 12 2017, @04:49PM (1 child)
debian is at fault.
when I installed ubuntu 17, I found that you have to install net-tools to get 'ifconfig' to be there!
how fucking stupid!
its not ubuntu, its debian. they have 'lost their minds', truly.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday June 13 2017, @01:27AM
Debian is not at fault. Refer to my other comment [soylentnews.org], but the TL;DR is you haven't kept kept up and are now complaining about it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @05:21PM (1 child)
Ok, stupid question. I've used ifconfig for ages, and I still type that out of habit. However, I've been getting use to the ip suite (ip addr and ip route in particular) since it has more capabilities. IPv6 with ifconfig can get a little hairy. Does it indeed not have ip either?
I hate systemd as much as the next person here. New is not always better, new is often not better these days, but sometimes new is better imho.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @10:25PM
recent upgrade informed me that ifupdown was going to stop paying attention to /etc/default because systemd doesn't like it. Oddly /etc/default is the place to put settings to bypass systemd and netnames and other freedesktop crap. Probably just a coincidence. Just remember it's perfectly easy to run debian without systemd.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday June 12 2017, @12:12PM (16 children)
Just as an added note, I had to look this up. The net-tools package is a whopping 200Kb. Yeah. Pretty stupid.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Monday June 12 2017, @12:27PM (15 children)
...groan... now I need two sides of a new 5 1/4" flippy disk. Hard to get one these days.
(old grin).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 12 2017, @12:35PM (7 children)
LOL - let me google for "flippy disk". I know, no fair poking fun at a typo, but I couldn't resist. ;^)
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Monday June 12 2017, @12:53PM (6 children)
Sorry, that's not a typo, it's a proper term.
You take a 1-sides floppy, cut a notch on the other side of the envelope, flip it around and, finger crossed, hope it's a good enough quality to work as a double-sided floppy.
There you have it [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 12 2017, @02:37PM (5 children)
I guess I'm not as old as I feel some days. I used very few 5 1/4 inch disks - almost everything I ever owned that used floppies used 3 1/2. I didn't know that the larger disks could be "flipped".
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 12 2017, @04:03PM
I remember flipping floppies frequently, as well as having one of the "punchers" to convert a single-sided disk to double-sided.
However, I'm not sure how common the "flippy" appellation was. I vaguely remember it being used casually as slang, and a quick Google search from old documents seems to indicate "flippy" or "flippy disk" often appeared in quotation marks the small number of times it comes up. I don't ever remember it being used in ads or manuals, etc., so I'm not sure how "proper" the term was. (I could be wrong, though -- it was a long time ago.)
I generally just called them double-sided floppies, as I think did most people.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday June 12 2017, @04:49PM
I'm 37 and remember using 5.25 quite often in the 80's. Even into the 90's as every PC up to my 486 had a 5.25.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 12 2017, @09:12PM
To make you feel better - I also used punch-cards in an attempt to write a program. It never ran, too many typos, gave up after 3 attempts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @01:28AM (1 child)
The real test when measuring age by floppy disks is if you even know that 8" disks exist, let alone used one.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 13 2017, @02:08AM
I used them.
If you want to get really-really back into the history:
1. did you ever used a PDP-11?
2. did you ever used punch cards? (IBM-360)
I'd be answering in the positive for both (no, I'm not that old, but programmers in a former communist country couldn't quite be choosers in their time).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday June 12 2017, @12:42PM (6 children)
Wow! That brings back some memories. Did you ever cut the little square out of a single sided floppy to make it a double sided? My friend had a special tool just to do that.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Monday June 12 2017, @12:48PM
Yeap. With mixed success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Touché) by SDRefugee on Monday June 12 2017, @03:52PM (4 children)
heh you wanna feel REALLY old?? Have your first computer use 8" floppy disks..
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 12 2017, @04:13PM (3 children)
[Cue creaky old-timer voice...]
"Back in MY day, we didn't have no stinkin' floppies. We had to use a damn tape, and it took a half hour to load a program!"
[Cue even creakier old-timer...]
"TAPE?! You had TAPE? I used to stay up all night feeding punch cards into the mainframe. Damn chad littered on the floor everywhere..."
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Monday June 12 2017, @04:58PM (2 children)
[ Cue ghost of dead old timer]
What's with this punch card stuff, we used to toggle in the operating system on the front panel switches (well, some of us)...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Monday June 12 2017, @10:21PM (1 child)
I overclocked my abacus with mineral oil. Unfortunately it's become unstable, less friction means it gets easy to accidentally misplace beads.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday June 12 2017, @10:51PM
Muh fingers have arthritis from counting on them too much....both ways and in a snowstorm! Or something.
...where'd I put muh teeth?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday June 12 2017, @01:01PM (5 children)
maybe ifconfig is absent but ip is present? Personally I hate the new syntax and device naming conventions, it reeks of "we want things to look professional so the new generation of certified sysadmins will look competent"
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @01:10PM (4 children)
It's called Dead Rat strategy. Change everything with a new API and tools. Then offer certification courses to use it. Repeat. Hey wait!
That sounds just like that evil ektoplasma infecting Seattle!
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday June 12 2017, @05:02PM
I have never heard of the "dead rat strategy". But either way, it makes sense in the commercial software world where selling "new" makes you money. Not in the open source world. This is a breakdown of how generations of software devs look at problems differently. The graybeards were happy and content with cryptic ways of doing things because that saved precious memory in ye olde days. The whippersnappers look at grandpas terminal running on a machine with 15 megapixel displays (5k), GPU's that are faster than all the computers on earth at the time grandpa was waiting for his terminal to refresh, and storage where a terabyte fits on your finger tip. Grandpa's way looks pretty ancient so it's time to start over. And I can agree with that as long as it improves the tool. But in many cases, the mindset is "new is better". Why? It just is. Worse is better.
(Score: 3, Informative) by KiloByte on Monday June 12 2017, @07:24PM (2 children)
Except that the old API has been deprecated 15 years ago or so. And for a good reason -- it's not adequate for any but simplest tasks. At some moment you need to get rid of the cruft.
Unlike systemd that breaks a good deal of functionality, iproute2 can do everything ifconfig could, the only thing that changed is the syntax as the old one wasn't able to express enough.
Whenever old syntax was ok, it was kept -- ss is almost completely compatible with netstat. The output changes, as netstat can't handle multiple processes on one socket, etc, but you were warned to not screen-scrape it.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @09:10PM
I'll get that sometimes it's necessary to break the whole API to enable new needs. But that doesn't block them from providing scripts that lets people to get up and running quickly without having to fuss with things.
And if the API is new to enable a whole new approach or framework. Then it's better to make a whole syntax adopted to that from the ground instead of the Wintel approach to things.. patch and kludge to hell. But there should be scripts to enable the use of the old command line interface.
Btw, what new features made it necessary to break this API?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @04:37AM
It can't write documentation for shit, is one.
Seriously, EBNF is for language spec and compiler design, not teaching. In the past five years I've found exactly zero useful tutorials on how to actually use the iproute packages. And no, one-off "this is how you use ip to do this rare ifconfig thing" examples don't count.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @09:09PM (1 child)
Looks to me like this. Linux started out as a free alternative to the SCO-dified Unice$$ of yesteryear. It took off. It does 99% what "good ole Unix" did, and in many areas has improved. One quick example: 'cp' (copy) has a '-r' (recurse into folders) option - yay no more "find / blah-blah | cpio many-flags".
BUT, Linux has become all about the (myriad) desktop managers, all about the look and feel, GUI, user-easy gloss. Not that any of that is bad. In fact it is the reason I and many others now run Linux on a daily basis. In the melee for eye-candy, the BASICS of Unix have been slowly lost. Oh, only 4% of our users want this, so we will leave this (previously stock-standard) utility out of the install media / ISO. And this one, and this one too, and.. this one. In the end you get a watered down system that looks great but lacks the powertools that are the building blocks for its very success. I want a full set of bricks so I can build anything I want - that IS the Unix way. My 2c, YMMV.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @09:13PM
Let new utilities have a "Checking for long greybear tools......[Not found, No computing for you!]" ;-)
Anyway its mostly a problem with new people that are ignorant. And that can be exploited to bite them.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Tuesday June 13 2017, @01:25AM
No, it's not, and you don't know what you're talking about. net-tools is obsolete [lwn.net] and has been considered so for a very long time [debian.org] because they had been unmaintained for years. As a result, everything has been moving to iproute2 [debian.org], with even the Linux Foundation page on net-tools [linuxfoundation.org] telling you to stop using it and switch, with a handy list of command equivalents.
Also, according to that lwn.net link, someone did fork net-tools and resume development after fifteen years of neglect, but then decided to make random changes to the tools' output, breaking any scripts relying on it. I guess Debian decided that since it can't trust the output, it's time to finally make the switch to iproute2 fully for its internal use.
You, TheGratefulNet, and the AC submitter have just failed to keep up despite iproute2 being over a decade old [kernel.org], and are now bitching that your obsolete tools aren't provided by default any more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @12:07PM
Being able to run an OS without installing anything is very cool.
You can use that to fix problems.
You can use that on someone else's box without touching his hard drive.
...and you can demo Linux for someone, again, without installing anything.
A gutted live-media distro doesn't make as good a demo.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by linuxrocks123 on Monday June 12 2017, @12:11PM (16 children)
The tools he's talking about have been deprecated since forever. You're not supposed to use "ifconfig" and "route" to manage your connection anymore; you're instead supposed to use something else that uses a newer kernel interface.
I'm not sure exactly what the other thing is, because I personally have just kept using ifconfig out of habit. I do know this situation has nothing to do with SystemD.
What someone needs to do is write an ifconfig that uses the newer kernel interface, then we can avoid riots and online shouting matches.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @12:16PM
Not having a ifconfig command however it's done is going to funnel a great deal of shitstorm towards whoever got that idea when the system installer/fixer finds this out at 03:00 in a server room somewhere without knowledgeable people around. It's usually "make the d-mn thing work now", oh it's missing essential tools => never again.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday June 12 2017, @12:22PM (9 children)
It's nmcli network manager command line interface. Just skimmed through the page. Looks like a pain.
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=20000&op=Reply&page=1&pid=524304#post_comment [soylentnews.org]
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday June 12 2017, @12:26PM (1 child)
Holy shit! Bad link I'm not even high... here you go:
Lubuntu:
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/nmcli.1.html [ubuntu.com]
And for Fedora pretty much the same shit, but heres the link:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Networking/CLI [fedoraproject.org]
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @01:06PM
Obviously ubuntu.com are not serious about security. No https option to access their site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @12:28PM
This is not the droid^W page you're looking for.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by nobu_the_bard on Monday June 12 2017, @12:48PM
Wouldn't it be better then, to do this:
- alias ifconfig and its options as their nmcli equivalents
- have the first line when ifconfig is used indicate what the equivalent command being executed is in nmcli
Then it's less likely users that never learned nmcli won't ragequit on you.
(Score: 3, Touché) by ArcticScavenger on Monday June 12 2017, @12:53PM
The program 'nmcli' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt install network-manager
On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Server, at least ifconfig is present, not sure I want to give it up right here.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @01:02PM
Faulty link.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 12 2017, @01:30PM
that looks absolutely horrible. As a freebsd user I strongly encourage linux to continue on its path to obscurity. Hurry up, so it can be gotten rid of and ignored, faster.
In the 80s/90s we had people making up joke "turing tarpit" languages like Intercal. Now the same jokers are ALL completely in charge of Linux system administration development. NMCLI in 2017 is a near perfect analogy to Intercal in 1997.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Monday June 12 2017, @01:54PM
Also, it's specifically for NetworkManager as far as I can see. As others have pointed out, there are much better options for a live CD like system rescue CD,
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @10:34PM
Dear god no. ip is the replacement. nm is just some gnome crap that gets uninstalled at the first opportunity.
(Score: 5, Informative) by cockroach on Monday June 12 2017, @12:34PM
That would probably be iproute2 [wikipedia.org] with the ip command.
I agree that removing tools like ifconfig is a rather unfortunate move but maybe an Ubuntu Desktop Live CD isn't what people should be using for system maintenance, there are better tools [system-rescue-cd.org] for that.
Also, complaining about a missing iptables frontend seems a bit silly.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @12:37PM (1 child)
Exactly this. Why should one have to learn a completely new user interface just because some kernel calls under the hood have changed?
Indeed, there could even be a script that takes ifconfig options, translates them into options for whatever tool replaces ifconfig, and calls that tool under the hood.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday June 12 2017, @04:03PM
It probably hasn't happened because the new kernel API is about 2 orders of magnitude more complex than the old one and offers little visible benefit for the trouble.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 12 2017, @12:41PM
Noted. But, if I boot up to a LiveCD, and the network isn't working as expected, I'm going to type "ifconfig" to find my own IP address to start with. Like yourself, I've just used it since about forever. And, if ifconfig can't even tell my my own IP address, much less anything else, I'm going to grab a different LiveCD to work from.
I concur that someone should rewrite ifconfig - but then again, some of us enjoy our riots and online shouting matches.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by srobert on Monday June 12 2017, @02:28PM
Systemd related or not, the consistency of BSD looks better with every major distro release of Linux.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @12:12PM (5 children)
That tools are missing could be because space constraints, configuration conflicts, inability to have foresight or just plain cooperating with the three letter powers. And retrieving and installing packages (apt-get etc) may fail miserably because disc media (CD) are usually read only or writable only as a gigantic kludge. Network or any other device to load code from may simple not be available. If you sit in a server room where communications are in a disarray and need to get.. the router up. A catch-22 is not something on the wish list.
It's not too uncommon to on a server to only have CDrom, RAID harddisc, network and serial as communication channels to load software. On top of that neither BIOS setup or I/O is handled in any normal way. So CDrom standalone is preferred. You may try to load from a RAID harddisc by preparing it as a part of a RAID but then you run a serious risk of screwing something else up with gigantic data losses as a consequence. There might be a hidden floppy interface, if you are willing to lift 20 kg of server from a cumbersome mechanical setup open up without loosing screws and find a 1.44MB drive lying around somewhere and succeed to have another computer that can format them and have said network connection = ouch! So why not try the network, well it may be restricted and if you enter the wrong parameters etc you may have to wait until the network administrator to wake up and reset the switch for you = wasted day. So serial, but then you need to have another computer there connected which can serve you the files over snail straw line using a cable no longer common. Unless it does the TX-TX thing and fries something or just doing it by ground loop sending your server to the scrap heap.
So please, just make the f%&¤%king LiveCD to work by itself or it will end up on the list of products to avoid hard.
The above scenario has of course many variations but the essence is the same. Any LiveCD that can stand on it's own is usually worthless outside a developer circumstances.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @12:47PM (1 child)
Any LiveCD that can stand on it's own
Any LiveCD that [can't] stand on [its] own
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @09:15PM
Have you ever tried balancing those bastards? CDs just fall over when placed on edge, unless you are very, very good at this kind of thing.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 12 2017, @01:34PM (2 children)
Don't forget USB.
I've rescued systems using USB. Upgrade, network card firmware doesn't work anymore or doesn't exist anymore, no problem put the OLD .deb file that has working firmware on a USB stick, plug in, install, reboot, all is well.
You can also do something similar with virtualization. mount the worlds smallest partition and copy a file to it, then mount that partition file on the booted up virtual image and access that second virtual disk.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @02:16PM (1 child)
Gah.. I had USB on my mind when I started writing that post. Oh well ;)
Well USB can provide CDrom, floppy, flash memory, network etc. So yeah it's a real option. The catch may be that support may not be there, BIOS don't want to boot it or that it's USB1 which means really slow.
As for virtualization. Those systems pretty much rely on there being a system to start with? So that host OS should be able to serve whatever is needed to get the job done?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 12 2017, @03:12PM
Yeah it would be pretty hard to find a situation messed up enough that all that doesn't work is the network but it still boots outside of R+D experiments making a new "gold" template for deployment.
Maybe if you're running vmware and something absolutely horrendous happened to vmware-tools... maybe.
Most of the time I'd spin up a new whatever it is, attach the dead old virtual hard drive to the new image and copy any data over that I need, assuming there is any.
Sometimes its fun to do dumb virtualization tricks purely for fun and instead of running modern OS try to get win2K to boot or try to get msdos installed and sometimes you can get wedged into weird situations.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by technoid_ on Monday June 12 2017, @12:14PM (4 children)
In the case of UFW, it isn't functionality that is missing, it is a utility to help with configuration.
Problem is, there are multiple utilities to help with this. You might like UFW but I like a different ones, so why is it wrong for the distro to let us decide?
If you need the OS to do everything for you, perhaps a Debian LiveCD isn't what you really want.
This is just whining.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @12:23PM
Whatever the distro chooses, add a README.TXT so people with a plain text console can get something rudimentary up quickly even if they haven't used the specific linux flavor of the month.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @12:59PM (2 children)
I assume one or the other is included. Now maybe BB is included with the network utils deleted, or not included at all.
However many distros have gotten rid of net-tools altogether in favor of iputils (which I personally dislike since the commands tend to be much longer and more complicated in order to do my standard bringup commands manually), however they DO work in a pinch.
If that is why net-tools isn't included, then there is nothing to see here. If it is not, then this is a major lapse on Debian's part.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @01:12PM (1 child)
So they made things more complicated for little gain. Guess that's a BSD right there.
(Score: 1) by technoid_ on Monday June 12 2017, @02:09PM
Debian moved to systemd, so obviously there isn't any concern about adding complexity for no real gain.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bot on Monday June 12 2017, @12:55PM (6 children)
I liked debian live, especially the web image builder.
But, after switching to systemd-less antix and systemd-limited mxlinux I found myself at ease with their live iso and frugal install scripts.
Give them a try. They are deb based.
For a pretty complete systemd less live cd, there is knoppix.
I am looking forward to try devuan 1.0, the early beta worked for me, I dunno how live CD are, though.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @01:14PM (5 children)
Devuan have a LiveCD yet?
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday June 12 2017, @01:42PM
https://files.devuan.org/devuan_jessie/minimal-live/ [devuan.org]
Contains a file
https://files.devuan.org/devuan_jessie/minimal-live/devuan_jessie_1.0.0_amd64_minimal-live_list.txt [devuan.org]
Contains a line
net-tools 1.60-26+b1
so I believe this is your lucky day.
I've never used the livecd for devuan so I donno any more about it. I do know that on my last legacy Debian boxes that have not upgraded to FreeBSD the upgrade to Devuan was utterly flawless and boring and everything "just worked".
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Monday June 12 2017, @01:59PM (3 children)
I haven't tried it, but it has a "minimal-live" image that will fit on a CD and a "desktop-live" one that will fit on a DVD. From the README.txt files:
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @02:19PM (2 children)
Btw, Have you had any experience on (server) BIOS that didn't want to boot USB and how you got around it? or not?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 12 2017, @03:21PM (1 child)
In the 90s we booted off floppies, but hardware with floppy today is probably rare.
I used some Soekris non-USB semi-embedded boxes where PXE network booting was the normal installation method. PXE is (or used to be) kinda weird to set up, but once it worked it was mostly reliable for installs.
Also windows boxes don't tolerate hard drive swapping but in the old days I once installed a machine with no working linux cdrom driver by moving its hard drive to a system where a working cdrom driver existed then installing off cdrom then swapping the hard drives back, worked fine. In retrospect I could have swapped the cdrom instead. In the very oldest days of cdroms before they were universally on the IDE bus, there were weird interfaces that were not IDE compatible. Things were weird in the early 90s.
(Score: 2) by nethead on Monday June 12 2017, @10:12PM
I had a stack of servers with RAID 1 I needed to install BSD on. I got one setup just the way I wanted, pulled the second drive and put it in the next box as the main drive and let it mirror. Repeat and rinse. (and re-IP/name)
How did my SN UID end up over 3 times my /. UID?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @03:25PM (1 child)
"ip" command from package iproute2 has replaced ifconfig and route ages ago.
Just because your grandfather used it does not make it relevant, especially in a space-constrained situation like a livecd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @10:33PM
Fuck You faggot hipster.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday June 12 2017, @03:33PM (9 children)
It probably got replaced because ifconfig and co. were being phased out for a few years now. Arch people like myself got in a bit ahead of the curve so I've gotten rather used to the crazy looking BNF help syntax.
Still has the subcommand design of git if it were written by the PowerShell guys though.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Monday June 12 2017, @05:51PM (7 children)
I have only briefly researched it, but all articles just seem to say (paraphrasing) 'nobody is happy about it but that's the way it is'.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Lagg on Tuesday June 13 2017, @03:05AM (6 children)
You're not seeing good technical justifications because the justifications are shit and don't really go along with how unix commands should work. So it's a hard sell.
Essentially: ifconfig didn't have feature X because it only cared about interfaces. ip has Y and Z because those have to do with the protocol.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday June 13 2017, @10:16PM (5 children)
Debian kept using and relying on net-tools despite it being unmaintained, because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The problem is that someone else decided to break it for them [lwn.net]. Someone started updating it again and chose to make output changes that broke scripts relying on programs in net-tools. Everything broken by this needed changing anyway, so it made sense to move to the alternative that's stable and isn't obsolete.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Wednesday June 14 2017, @07:27AM (4 children)
Interesting. I don't give much thought to debian except for critical systems pretty much because of your point about the philosophy. And I don't think that someone deciding to be a maintainer again should be considered a bad thing especially if its their project. But as far as debian goes I suppose there's not much other recourse that would fit the policy. Or that would be a reasonable technical workaround. I do have my own issues with the policies, but highly off topic and irrelevant. Better than trying to maintain their own ipkit.
Kind of pains me a bit to see that this was another half-technical-choice. Or at least as far as debian goes anyway. At least ip has a somewhat smoother table syntax than iptables. Once you can read what its actual syntax is:
lagg@lagg.me[~]$ ip route help
Usage: ip route { list | flush } SELECTOR
ip route save SELECTOR
ip route restore
ip route showdump
ip route get ADDRESS [ from ADDRESS iif STRING ]
[ oif STRING ] [ tos TOS ]
[ mark NUMBER ]
ip route { add | del | change | append | replace } ROUTE
SELECTOR := [ root PREFIX ] [ match PREFIX ] [ exact PREFIX ]
[ table TABLE_ID ] [ proto RTPROTO ]
[ type TYPE ] [ scope SCOPE ]
ROUTE := NODE_SPEC [ INFO_SPEC ]
NODE_SPEC := [ TYPE ] PREFIX [ tos TOS ]
[ table TABLE_ID ] [ proto RTPROTO ]
[ scope SCOPE ] [ metric METRIC ]
INFO_SPEC := NH OPTIONS FLAGS [ nexthop NH ]...
NH := [ encap ENCAPTYPE ENCAPHDR ] [ via [ FAMILY ] ADDRESS ]
[ dev STRING ] [ weight NUMBER ] NHFLAGS
FAMILY := [ inet | inet6 | ipx | dnet | mpls | bridge | link ]
OPTIONS := FLAGS [ mtu NUMBER ] [ advmss NUMBER ] [ as [ to ] ADDRESS ]
[ rtt TIME ] [ rttvar TIME ] [ reordering NUMBER ]
[ window NUMBER] [ cwnd NUMBER ] [ initcwnd NUMBER ]
[ ssthresh NUMBER ] [ realms REALM ] [ src ADDRESS ]
[ rto_min TIME ] [ hoplimit NUMBER ] [ initrwnd NUMBER ]
[ features FEATURES ] [ quickack BOOL ] [ congctl NAME ]
[ pref PREF ]
TYPE := [ unicast | local | broadcast | multicast | throw |
unreachable | prohibit | blackhole | nat ]
TABLE_ID := [ local | main | default | all | NUMBER ]
SCOPE := [ host | link | global | NUMBER ]
NHFLAGS := [ onlink | pervasive ]
RTPROTO := [ kernel | boot | static | NUMBER ]
PREF := [ low | medium | high ]
TIME := NUMBER[s|ms]
BOOL := [1|0]
FEATURES := ecn
ENCAPTYPE := [ mpls | ip | ip6 ]
ENCAPHDR := [ MPLSLABEL ]
Also, I can certainly say they won't be hurting for output stability. Its output is friendlier to my python than my face.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Wednesday June 14 2017, @07:33AM
Sorry I'm a total jackass. I meant to s/iptables/route/. It was a tabular slip.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday June 16 2017, @07:32AM (2 children)
It wasn't that they thought picking up maintenance was bad, it was how they did it. Abruptly breaking output after something like 20 years of stability is kind of bullshit. If you want to update the output, fine, but you should at least provide a compatibility option to get the original formatting. That's the normal, civil, proper option; anything else is just being a dick, and doing so at that scale is really shitty.
Also, don't know about other distros, but Debian's still keeping net-tools available, so it's not like we have to quit using those tools, we just can't expect them to be on the install images because they are no longer fit-for-purpose. I still have it installed and use certain utilities from it because for certain use-cases it still works fine. If it's not around or doesn't do what I need, though, I know iproute2 will be there, and likely won't be changing output any time soon. I still like ifconfig and route's output for quick reading, so I still tend to use them when I want to check something, but the "ip" variations seem better for parsing and I'm more likely to use them for bringing up interfaces or scripting.
That might be where net-tools is going development-wise, and it would make sense. There's no requirement for the scriptable tool to be human-readable or vice-versa, so there's room for both to co-exist.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Friday June 16 2017, @07:59AM (1 child)
Arch gives them too still, but I try to avoid due to the obvious course of development with re. to ip. It's not going anywhere. But yes as far as parsing goes there is little doubt at all you want to use only it. It gives fully qualified IP addresses, predictable hard tabs, etc.
Someone should just write a frontend that converts its output to the last recognized nettools format. It's certainly a better shim than both possibly doing different things and loading different symbols to accomplish the same tasks.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:55AM
That might be a good use for a separate frontend, considering how obtuse ip is. Or maybe a switch for ip, like how many tools have a -h switch to switch to human-readable numbers/output.
Also, a note about the documentation (or lack thereof): while I agree with that one AC that having the BNF grammar available is useful, but having it as the only output of "ip [foo] help" is not, I noticed there's actually pretty extensive help for the ip commands in the manpages. Try "man ip-route" or "man ip-address" for example. (The entire list is given in "man ip" under the "see also" section.) No idea why nobody thought to put something a little more useful than just the BNF in the `ip [foo] help` output, but at least there's an option.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @04:47AM
The fact that their idea of "help" is BNF suggests that they're idiots, assholes, or both. Maybe there's a more charitable explanation, but it's clear that they're not interested in making it possible for people to begin using it before they're experts in using it.
The various BSDs are looking better every day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @05:38PM (1 child)
Please, you gotta get a better name if you want mainstream penetration (no pun int.).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @01:13AM
Someone who is scared off by an interesting name is probably not the ideal user for Linux.
Folks who think that Lubuntu is weird would also think that Ubuntu was weird.
Some folks are curious enough to Google that. [google.com]
Lubuntu could be thought of as "Light Ubuntu", suitable for older, less powerful machines.
It uses LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) and there is work on using the LXQt desktop when that is sufficiently developed.
Tacking an L onto the front of Ubuntu makes perfect sense.
...and, frankly, I'd rather not have incurious people using Linux.
It's a bad match and makes for e.g. repeats of the same dumb, easily-searched-out questions in help forums.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Monday June 12 2017, @06:10PM (2 children)
This is a LiveCD, you'd have to run several commands every time you booted up. And since it is a CD you couldn't add those commands to a startup script. UFW is less of an oversight than net-tools.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @09:12PM (1 child)
Ah, but you need to be at least an Innitiate, not a Novice, and be sworn into the secret "something" to append to "sudo apt install __"
Good luck finding documentation. Online searches most often provide "help" that is a decade out of date.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 14 2017, @12:39AM
Online searches most often provide "help" that is a decade out of date
Google has a thing where you can limit searches by time.
http://www.google.com/search?tbs=qdr:y&q= [google.com]
y == year
m == month
d == day
h == hour
You can even turn that into &tbs=qdr:y,sbd:1
(sort by date) so that they will be ordered most-recent-first.
.
Hey! I just noticed that this is story #20,000.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]