net-tools vs iproute2

The net-tools has been deprecated and plans to obsolete was stated from debian-devel mailing list around 2009 (https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/03/msg00780.html ) .

It doesnt support many of the modern features of the linux kernel, the interface is far from optimal and difficult to use in automatisation, and also, it hasn’t got much love in the last years.

On the other side, the iproute suite, introduced around the 2.2 kernel line, has both a much better and consistent interface, is more powerful, and is almost ten years old, so nobody would say it’s untested.

While the net-tools package is deprecated, it is still available to install and use if required or preferred. It should be noted that this package is no longer being maintained nor actively developed. Very few patches are added to the net-tools package at this time.

The iproute2 suite offers the ability to display Infiniband addresses, which net-tools cannot do. It is also able to read from multiple routing tables, network namespaces, and assign multiple IP addresses to one interface (as opposed to creating/displaying an alias interface with the second IP address).

The iproute2 package also contains a tool called ss which can help with diagnosing network issues with more details and granularity than the net-tools provided tool netstat.

Another tool which iproute2 provides that net-tools does not is the tc used for traffic control within the kernel.

Root Cause for change

The net-tools package uses obsolete ioctl() while iproute2 uses netlink socket which has a wider range of capabilities.

Many drivers have also changed (or cleared) statistics which ifconfig (provided by net-tools) utilizes which makes them useless or unhelpful for reliable debugging.