Understanding the net-tools and iproute2 suites

For quite some time, net-tools has been the suite of tools used to manage network connections on Linux systems. The net-tools suite includes commands such as ifconfig, route, netstat, and others (which we'll discuss shortly). The problem with net-tools is that it hasn't been updated by its developers in well over a decade, making many distributions opt to abandon it in favor of the iproute2 suite, which offers the same functionality (but with different commands to achieve the same goals). Even though net-tools are being deprecated, quite a few distributions still include it. For example, Debian includes both iproute2 and net-tools, so you can use commands from either suite. In CentOS, iproute2 is present though net-tools is not installed by default. If you would like to utilize the older net-tools, you can install it in CentOS with the following command:

# yum install net-tools

So, why would you want to install net-tools if it&apos...