ifconfig Woes...

[Ellipsis]

Hello everyone,

 

Firstly let me say that I've tried su - and /sbin/ifconfig it's not there. For some reason I seem to have "lost" it or something because ever since I installed the distro a while back it hasn't been there. I'm running Debian. I do have iwconfig, which for most of my needs works but I'm trying to get the loopback (lo) interface running but without ifconfig that's kind of difficult :P

 

I do have commands for ifup and ifdown but they don't work because (I'm assuming from reading error outputs) that they call on ifconfig.

 

If someone could help me out on how to fix/get ifconfig i'd greatly appreciate it.

 

Thank you

[hybrid]

I'm not sure which package ifconfig belongs to, and I wasn't able to immediately find out. I don't have a Debian system handy, but could you try:

 

Code:

dpkg --search ifconfig

 

and/or

 

Code:

dpkg --search ifup

 

Hopefully, one of those (possibly only the second command) should show you which package those programs belong to. Once you know that package name, you should be able to reconfigure it to fix the absence of ifconfig:

 

Code:

dpkg-reconfigure packagename

 

Alternatively if you do have a package name which looks right, you could attempt to apt-get install the package again to try and reinstall it.

 

Again, I'm not sure exactly that this is the best way of going about fixing this, so other people with more Debian knowledge may be able to help further. Hopefully it's a place to start.

[Dungeon-Dave]

Under an RPM-based system, /sbin/ifconfig is part of the "net-tools" package.

 

Not sure if that's similar with Debian-based distros.

[Ellipsis]

Thanks guys for the help. Yes it appears that the net-tools package is the same here in Debian. I've tried the dpkg-reconfigure command and the apt-get install. dpkg-reconfigure doesn't seem to fix the problem and apt-get install doesn't allow it to occur as it says I have the newest version of net-tools so it wouldn't re-install it.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Thanks

[hybrid]

Try running this as root:

 

Code:

apt-get --reinstall install net-tools

 

That should force the reinstallation of the whole package even though it is present, and with any luck, drop ifconfig back onto your system. Let us know how it goes. :)