On Wednesday, June 08, 2011 05:50:31 PM you wrote:
> But the ifcfg scripts hardly qualify as a "major customization" - that's
> a fairly standard way of doing things across many distros, and in fact
> the only way you could do it at all until the current release (the old
> config gui was simply a clunky interface to these very text files).

Most of the current 'top 10' distributions are going towards NetworkManager.  So NM knowledge importance will increase.  Whether that's a good thing or not is left as an exercise for the reader.

My biggest gripe is that Debian chose to do things differently (in more than just this area) so that a Debian-based system is rather different than most of the others.

However, if only the NM tools are used for config, then that knowledge should, hypothetically, allow the same admin commands to work across the Deb-RH divide for networking even though the backend configs are different.  Whether that's a good thing or not is also left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

> And it's all changed again on F15 (so presumably also SL7 eventually).  

Yeah, that and the loss of decades-old /etc/inittab knowledge.... progress in some areas results in deprecation of others.  This is true in most fields, but more true in IT than in most others.