short answer: `/bin/ip` replaces `ifconfig` -- it's newer and more powerful

more info: http://www.tty1.net/blog/2010/ifconfig-ip-comparison_en.html

Asides from ifconfig not being maintained (which is reason enough not to use it), I always wondered specifically what was broken with it.

Then I worked for an arbitrage desk at an investment bank. They used virtual addresses for different IPs, on top of vlans connected to different exchanges, redundantly (ie bonded).

Not a single IP-having interface appeared using ifconfig.

OT but ip is a really unfortunate name that will be hard to google for.

They're a bit dated. Use dig instead of nslookup, and right from the ifconfig man page:

NOTE

This program is obsolete! For replacement check ip addr and ip link. For statistics use ip -s link.

Where does it say that?

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=ifconfig

Pedantry, but keep in mind that there isn't really "the" man page for this.

Ubuntu might want to deprecate ifconfig, but that doesn't mean everyone does.

You're right, and I use OpenBSD myself so I should have qualified it. The man page I quoted was CentOS in this case.

This is Linux specific advice for ifconfig, correct?

Yes

On nslookup, in particular, the program has some ambiguous behavior and can be problematic when trying to debug certain DNS issues. Dig was developed to be a reliable replacement that has predictable behavior at all times. There is a companion to dig called "host" that is a simple lookup, including looking up in-addr.arpa entries ("host 8.8.8.8"). In most cases, you will get more consistent results by using dig and host, which is why nslookup is deprecated.

They've been replaced with ipadm/dladm: http://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/GeneralAdministration

And dnsip/dnsipq/dnsmx/dnsname/dnstxt: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/tools.html

What? Your reply seems purposefully disingenuous and misleading. The ipadm and dladm commands seem to be specific to Solaris and derivatives. And I can not believe that you are seriously proposing that the new standard commands for doing DNS is to use DJB’s tools.

What the original post most likely referred to is to use ip instead of ifconfig, and to use dig instead of nslookup.

Calm down a bit. Of course my post was in jest (well intentioned I might add) - I was pointing out the TMTOWTDI nature of this entire debate. The goal here wasn't to instruct or mislead.

The Linux way isn't always the way the rest of Unix is going. In fact, most of our current OS's are a hodgepodge of different great things developed by different teams - for example, rsync from the Samba devs, sudo from OpenBSD, git from Linux, etc.

This is one of the great things about Unix is that it's a big sandbox to play in. The entire "lets replace init" movement from the last 10 years is pretty fascinating in it's own right. Spend some time looking at how the other crowds out there are doing things - you might find something interesting and helpful.

I use dig, but in the name of correctedness, dig is as much a BIND tool as the others are djbdns tools.

nslookup is also a BIND tool, so its logical successor is indeed dig.

Nothing.