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Yesterday, I was upgrading packages and came across NEWS.gz in netbase 5.4:

netbase (5.4) unstable; urgency=medium

  • Stopped recommending ifupdown because nowadays there are options. For the time being it will still be installed by default because it has important priority. (Closes: #824884)

What other options are there? I looked up the bug mentioned therein but found nothing about any other tools.

Can somebody share what tools the DD/DM might be talking about?

I use ifup and ifdown to clear any temporary ethernet networking issues and it works most of the time:

$ sudo ifdown eth0

This clears all and any dhcp leases 

$ sudo ifup eth0

After half a minute to a minute, do this to make sure you get a new lease and are in business.

At times, when I'm not using Internet for much, I do use 

$ ping debian.org

in one of the VT (virtual Console Terminals) to make sure things are moving along.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
9

The two other main networking tools nowadays on Linux are Network Manager and systemd-networkd.

ifupdown isn't going away yet, the change in netbase is just cleanup: there's no reason for it to recommend networking tools (considering recommendations as defined in Debian Policy), and removing the recommendation is safe because default installations still end up with ifupdown installed. Cleaning such dependencies up will simplify possible future switches to other default tools.

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6

You may use

sudo ifconfig eth0 down sudo ifconfig eth0 up

If you have wireless interface use

sudo ifconfig wlan0 down sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
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  • 2
    This isn't a complete replacement for ifup/ifdown: access.redhat.com/solutions/27166 Commented Jan 9, 2017 at 13:53
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    The ifconfig command is also deprecated in favor of the iproute2 package. The recommended alternatives are: sudo ip link set eth0 down and sudo ip link set eth0 up respectively. Commented Jan 9, 2017 at 16:33
  • 1
    Serious question. How is "ip link set eth0 up", i.e. typing 5 words which I can't auto-complete, better than just "ifup eth0"? Commented Jun 15, 2020 at 20:52
  • It is not better or worse, because it is not a replacement. The answer is simply wrong, as the first comment already mentioned. ip utility is of much lower level than ifup was, in fact, ifup uses the facilities that ip or (deprecated) ifconfig provides to do its job. Commented May 22, 2024 at 8:29

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