In older Linux distributions, ifconfig, in conjunction with the utility route, was used to connect a computer to a network, and to define routes between networks. Solaris has historically used ifconfig for all network interface configuration, but as of Solaris 10 introduced dladm to perform data-link (OSI model layer 2) configuration, reducing ifconfig's purview to IP configuration. The Berkeley Software Distribution UNIX operating systems (e.g., NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD) continue active development of ifconfig and extension of its functionality to cover the configuration of wireless networking interfaces, VLAN trunking, controlling hardware features such as TSO or hardware checksumming or setting up bridge and tunnel interfaces. In this process, the network interface is first disabled (set down) with the ifconfig command, followed by a MAC change command: Ifconfig is also commonly used to change the medium access control (MAC) address of an interface.

The parameter txqueuelen is measured in number of Ethernet frames and is the size of the buffer that is being managed by the network scheduler.

Inet6 fe80::20d:bff:feed:84fb%ural0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0xa Media: IEEE802.11 DS2 mode 11b hostap (autoselect mode 11b hostap) TX packets:44641779 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 The following two examples show the output of the tool when querying the state of a single active interface each on a Linux-based host (interface eth0) and the ural0 interface on an OpenBSD installation.Įth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0F:20:CF:8B:42

As an interactive tool, system administrators routinely use the utility to display and analyze network interface parameters.

At boot time, many Unix-like operating systems initialize their network interfaces with shell scripts that call ifconfig. Common uses for ifconfig include setting the IP address and netmask of a network interface and disabling or enabling an interface.

Ifconfig display for mac