in the man page. ifconfig -au affects all interfaces marked as up,
and ifconfig -ad affects only the interfaces marked down. ifconfig -a
still handles everything. This change is purely for compatibility with
SunOS, for those who might be accustomed to the SunOS ifconfig's
behavior.
- The -a flag now works just as it does in SunOS: '-a' is actually
handled like a wildcard for all interfaces. 'ifconfig -a' displays
the status of all interfaces, 'ifconfig -a netmask 0xffffff00' sets
the netmask of all interfaces, and so forth. I don't know if many
people really need to be able to set the netmasks of all interfaces
at once, but the SunOS ifconfig seems to allow this, so there you
have it.
- An 'ether_status' function has been added to display the ethernet
address of all ethernet interfaces. Again, as in SunOS, you must
be root in order for this to work. The ethernet address is read
from /dev/kmem using kvm_open() and kvm_read(), much in the same
was as it's done with netstat. If you choose to install ifconfig
set-gid kmem then normal users will be able to see the ethernet
address as well, though this may not be desireable. This feature
requires a small change to the ifconfig Makefile: you need to link
with -lkvm in order to use the kvm_*() functions.
Submitted by: wpaul
