net-tools must die

[Chuck Anderson]

On Fri, Apr 01, 2011 at 09:33:52PM +0000, Ben Boeckel wrote:
> Xose Vazquez Perez <xose.vazquez at gmail.com> wrote:
> > At the same time, we believe that most packages using net-tools should
> > be patched to use iproute instead, while others can continue using the
> > wrappers for some time. The ifupdown package is obviously the first
> > candidate, but it seems that a version using iproute has been available
> > in experimental since 2007.
> 
> Maybe this is the wrong place, but is iproute going to honor
> USERCTL="yes" in the ifcfg scripts? It seems it currently doesn't
> whereas ifup/ifdown do:
> 
> % grep USERCTL /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-em2
> USERCTL="yes"
> % ip link set em2 down
> RTNETLINK answers: Operation not permitted

iproute has no way to honor such things.  It is a low level tool that 
doesn't read configuration files, do privilege escalation to be able 
to perform system level tasks as a normal user, etc.  iproute compares 
to ifconfig and route, not ifup/ifdown.