when i type in ifconfig in terminal it says "bash: ifconfig:command not found" i also tried loging in as root with same message, any suggestions.

It's usually in /sbin, which might not be in your path.

When all else fails...

It is displayed in /sbin alright, but it doesnt want to run even though am in that directory. this has never happened to me that a command didn't want to run

Did you try explicitly typing /sbin/ifconfig?

A normal user most likely should be able to run "/sbin/ifconfig". Look at the permissions: "ls -l /sbin/ifconfig".
However a security setting may disallow it. The command will only allow reading information if a normal user runs it. For example, to check what your devices IP address is.
To change device setting with the command you need to run "sudo /sbin/ifconfig". Here you probably have to include the full path. This is a security safeguard to prevent a hacker from placing a program by the same name in your path. Or to prevent sudoers from executing a different ifconfig program which might give them full root access.

Also check the logs to see if the selinux configuration prevents this command from being run or executed by a normal user. Again, this may be an indirect setting due to a generic security level policy. ( For example, maybe you have restricted access to /proc to prevent abuse by a normal user on the machine. It is possible that such a policy could end up restricting the use of /sbin/ifconfig. I doubth this, however. Blocking access to /proc would disable /sbin/ifconfig so restricting its use would be redundant.

It might be a good habit to include the full path names for commands in /sbin/ and /usr/sbin/, rather than adding these paths to $PATH. Normally when you use them you will be using "sudo" to perform the command as root and will need to anyway.

You cannot execute a command from your cwd unless "." is in your $PATH. To run a command in cwd you need to prefix it with "./", such as ./ifconfig .