Unless a device name was specified on the command line, the mii-tool utility automatically checked Ethernet interfaces from eth0 to eth7. Similarly, running the mii-diag or ether-wake utility without the device name caused it to use eth0 by default. However, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 introduces the possibility to use arbitrary names for these network interfaces. Because of this, the mii-tool, mii-diag, and ether-wake utilities have been adapted to require a device name to be specified on the command line. (BZ#682368)

Due to an incorrect use of 32-bit integers, running the netstat utility with the "-s" (or "--statistics") command line option on a 64-bit architecture could cause some entries in the "IpExt" section to be displayed with negative values. With this update, integers on 64-bit architectures are now handled properly, and the "netstat -s" command now produces the correct output. (BZ#580054)

When the netstat utility is run with the "-c" (or "--continuous") command line option, it prints the selected information continuously every second. Previously, netstat failed to free the allocated memory. Consequent to this, running the utility for a long time could cause it to consume all available memory. With this update, the underlying source code has been corrected to free the allocated memory when appropriate, and running the netstat utility with the "-c" option no longer leads to a memory leak. (BZ#634539)

Prior to this update, the manual page for the netstat utility stated that running the utility with the "-a" (or "--all") command line option allows a user to list both listening and non-listening sockets. Since this description was rather vague, this update extends the manual page to provide a clear explanation of which sockets are classified as non-listening. (BZ#614931)