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it is a one-line ifconfig invocation for those that understand the terminal and know about ifconfig, which does not hold for the vast majority of users I know

it is a one-line ifconfig invocation for those that understand the terminal and know about ifconfig, which does not hold for the vast majority of users I know people who are just as much afraid of the terminal as they are of the network settings. And stepping someone through opening the terminal and typing something is approximately the same number of actions (in clicks and keystrokes) as navigating to the settings panel and typing in the info. And while I agree that the example of modifying the network settings is contrived and thus not a good example of the usefulness of this setup, the difference between modifying network settings via the system settings GUI and from the terminal with ifconfig is that one will be remembered after a reboot and one will not be despite both having similar surface complexity to change. This is mainly because the actual settings are buried in some obscure, OSX specific file somewhere that most likely isn't even editable without the GUI (same with Windows (buried in the registry) and with Gnome's Network Manager (buried in ~/.gconf/system/networking/connections)).

hexley 17y ago
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist (a plain text, XML file)
- thwarted 17y ago
  Yeah, so this is the same as gnome's gconf settings for NetworkManager preferences. But that being said, the plist file format isn't all that great (there was a time when Apple had binary "compiled plist" files, but the pl command no longer supports that) -- the alternating "key" and value tags only associated by order in the file is kind of anti-XML. On one of my Xserves with two interfaces active, this file is 9k, massive for its purpose. This is not something that even an experienced administrator would want to edit using anything other than the GUI, doing so would be quite error prone. So if you want your settings to stick, you should be doing it from the GUI on OSX. The complexity of doing it from the GUI in a way that sticks and from the command line in a way that doesn't stick are roughly the same, but the results are different: to get it to stick by editing from the command line is quite a bit more complex.

hexley 17y ago

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist (a plain text, XML file)

thwarted 17y ago
Yeah, so this is the same as gnome's gconf settings for NetworkManager preferences. But that being said, the plist file format isn't all that great (there was a time when Apple had binary "compiled plist" files, but the pl command no longer supports that) -- the alternating "key" and value tags only associated by order in the file is kind of anti-XML. On one of my Xserves with two interfaces active, this file is 9k, massive for its purpose. This is not something that even an experienced administrator would want to edit using anything other than the GUI, doing so would be quite error prone. So if you want your settings to stick, you should be doing it from the GUI on OSX. The complexity of doing it from the GUI in a way that sticks and from the command line in a way that doesn't stick are roughly the same, but the results are different: to get it to stick by editing from the command line is quite a bit more complex.