[CentOS] CentOS 5.5: what do /etc/sysconfig/networking and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts exactly ?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 7:25 AM, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg
<Nicolas.Thierry-Mieg at imag.fr> wrote:
> giggzounet wrote:
>> Le 24/11/2010 09:22, John R Pierce a écrit :
>> this script just uses /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. All my interfaces
>> work fine. My problem sit to understand the intereaction between
>> /etc/sysconfig/networking and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. When I
>> boot the network script read and set up my interface with the
>> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts files. So why are there
>> /etc/sysconfig/networking ? how these /etc/sysconfig/networking files
>> are used ?
>
> AFAIK /etc/sysconfig/networking/* is only used by system-config-network,
> you can define "profiles" and then switch from one to the other, and
> system-config-network copies (or hardlinks?) the relevant parts to
> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts.
> Note that lots of stuff in /etc/sysconfig/networking are hardlinks to
> files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts or /etc (eg hosts and
> resolv.conf on my system here), they're not actually different files.
>
> Just avoid system-config-network and configure stuff yourself in
> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts and /etc/sysconfig/network, and you'll be
> fine.

And, in fact, system-config-network is quite dangerous. It's one of
numerous tools that will manipulate the network scripts, does so
inconsistently, and will overwrite legitimate stored values from the
actual /etc/sysconfig/netw-rk-scripts/ files without any way to
restore the relevant values. Pair bonding, for example, can only be
configured manually and system-config-network blows it away.

Don't use it if you can avoid it. Use netconfig (which is,
unfortunately, discarded for RHEL 6) or learn the new, bloated, and
also inconsistently managed ways of NetworkManager. (I'm not happy
about NetworkManager, but we seem to be stuck with it going forward.)