Hallo together,

my company decided to test the use of linux on database servers. My colleagues and me play around with oracle linux (based on RHEL5, afaik) at the moment and configure the network.

We heard in a short introduction that network interfaces can be configured with ip and ifconfig.

Bringing eth0 down with these commands (ifconfig eth0 down and ip link set eth0 down) work as they should. When we try ifconfig eth0 up or ip link set eth0 up, we get no error message. But when we try to ping another host, it tells us that the network is not reachable.

The only way to reactivate the interface is using the ifup eth0 command - the only one of the three, which has no manpage (which I found rather odd).

Is this normal or did I misinterpret the manpages of ifconfig and ip? English is not my first language, so I might have misunderstood something..

Thanks in advance!

PS: I searched google and used the forum search, but you don't get many useful links when looking for "ip link set up" or "ifconfig"... especially when "ip" and "up" are not possible to search for in the forum because they're to short.
So please don't jump on me if the question has already been answered here, I tried my best

This is normal… you need to do something in addition to putting the interface in “up” mode in order to use it, but in order not to use it, all you really need to do is put it in “down” mode. I hope that makes sense.

So as an example, this is how you might bring up an interface:
OR
Obviously, this is for a certain static IP address on a certain network. Both these methods should automatically add a route to the relevant network (you can also accomplish this manually using the “route” or “ip route” commands). The second command illustrates my original point more clearly: to be able to use an interface, you need to bring it “up” on the hardware (link) level, and then assign an address to it on the network level. When you want to stop using it, all you need to do is bring it “down” on the link level, and the network level will (usually) automatically disappear.

The other commands (ifup) and (ifdown) are usually not binary executables, but actually scripts. The reason they have no standard manpages is that each distribution has their own version (but that should not bar a specific distribution from provided specific documentation for their specific scripts). These scripts usually take care of the work for you. They scan some config files to determine whether you want to assign a static address or use DHCP. If it determines you want static, it will then look for the ip, the network, and broadcast addresses (and any other specifiable bits of information) before executing the above commands.