This April marked the ten year anniversary of the last net-tools release. We decided to look at this as an opportunity to deprecate net-tools and provide alternative, and better maintained, solutions for net-tools functionality. This has a few consequences, but most people should not notice.
net-tools will continue to be in the repositories, so scripts relying on it should still work.
rc.conf
A new syntax is introduced in rc.conf for configuring a simple
network setup using iproute2 rather than net-tools. The old
functionality is still preserved for those preferring to stay with
that, but do not expect it to gain new features.
The new syntax is very simplistic and only supports one wired network
device (configured statically or by dhcp) and we do not expect to add
more features in the future. We want to encourage the use of more
advanced network solutions, such as networkmanager or our own
netcfg.
domainname (a.k.a. nisdomainname, a.k.a ypdomainname)
These binaries are now provided by yp-tools, rather than by
net-tools. Furthermore, the domain name is no longer set by
initscripts, rather it is dealt with entirely by the ypbind rc script.
Before this change the domain name was handled inconsistently,
sometimes being read from /etc/conf.d/nisdomainname, and sometimes
from /etc/defaultdomain. From now on, the domain name is only ever
read from /etc/conf.d/nisdomainname.