Occasional Finds

Where to find the ifconfig source code?
Since Fedora Core is supposed to be open source,
it has got to be somewhere.
Turns out the Fedora home page
has a distribution page, and on that page,
there is a link to a mirror site.
Source SRPMs are available after all.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution
http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/mirrors.html
http://mirror.linux.duke.edu/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/source/SRPMS/

Which SRPM to get?
At the Fedora core 5 shell promt, find the path of ifconfig,
then find the package it belongs to.
Then assume that the SRPM has the same base name as the RPM.

which ifconfig
/sbin/ifconfig

rpm -qf /sbin/ifconfig
net-tools-1.60-62.1

So we need the net-tools SRPM.

wget http://mirror.linux.duke.edu/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/source/SRPMS/net-tools-1.60-62.1.src.rpm

It is a good idea to install RPM build tools as a non-privileged user.

yum install fedora-rpmdevtools

Then create an RPM build file directory structure:

fedora-buildrpmtree

After the above command, a file and a folder is created
in your homedir:

ls $HOME/.rpmmacros $HOME/rpmbuild

Then install the net-tools source

rpm --install net-tools-1.60-62.1.src.rpm

The above command install SRPMs in $HOME/rpmbuild
by default, no matter where your current working directory
is.

Then build the net-tools:

cd $HOME/rpmbuild/SPECS
rpmbuild -ba net-tools.spec

On my test PC, there are a lot of warnings,
but no fatal errors I could see. I got a new ifconfig
binary after a few seconds. Lets do a test:

$HOME/rpmbuild/BUILD/net-tools-1.60/ifconfig

Output is the same as that from /sbin/ifconfig.
Now all we have to figure out is where to make a few changes.