How To Install Ifconfig on RHEL 8 / CentOS 8 Linux

Do you get 'Ifconfig' Command Not Found in your RHEL 8 / CentOS 8 minimal server installation?. The minimal installation of RHEL 8 / CentOS 8 doesn’t come with the ifconfig command. See RHEL 8 New Features

Ifconfig is a command line tool used to configure the kernel-resident network interfaces. With ifconfig you can configure a network interface, display all interfaces which are currently available, even if down.

NOTE: The ifconfig program is obsolete! For replacement check ip addrand.ip link commands.

On a Minimal installation of RHEL 8 / CentOS 8, the ifconfig command is provided by the packagenet-tools, which is Basic networking management tools group package.

$ sudo yum provides ifconfig
Updating Subscription Management repositories.
Updating Subscription Management repositories.
Last metadata expiration check: 21 days, 0:07:56 ago on Fri 30 Nov 2018 03:57:18 AM EST.
net-tools-2.0-0.51.20160912git.el8.x86_64 : Basic networking tools
Repo        : @System
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/sbin/ifconfig

net-tools-2.0-0.51.20160912git.el8.x86_64 : Basic networking tools
Repo        : rhel-8-for-x86_64-baseos-beta-rpms
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/sbin/ifconfig

Install ifconfig on RHEL 8 / CentOS 8

To get ifconfig command, install the net-tools package:

sudo yum -y install net-tools

Ifconfig Usage Cheat sheet

1. Display network settings of the first ethernet adapter

$ ifconfig wlan0
$ ifconfig eth0

2. Display all interfaces, even if down:

$ ifconfig -a

3. Take down / up a network adapter:

$ ifconfig wlan0/eth0 {up|down}

4. Set a static IP and netmask:

$ ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.100 netmask 255.255.255.0

5. You may also need to add a gateway IP

$ route add -net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 192.168.1.1

6. Change MAC address

$ ifconfig eth0 hw ether AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF

7. Enable Promiscuous Mode

ifconfig eth0 promisc
ifconfig eth0 -promisc

8. Add New Alias to Network Interface

ifconfig eth0:0 172.16.25.127
ifconfig eth0:0 down

Now you have ifconfig on your RHEL 8 / CentOS 8 server.

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