On linux the net-tools suite of utilities has been long since deprecated. The relevant code that gets executed on Fedora and EPEL should be identified and patched out, with a suitable pull request upstream, to remove the dependency on any tool in the net-tools package and instead use suitable tools form iproute2.
Last time this came up, Ravindra mentioned there's an upstream (VMware) bug to change this, but I don't actually have a link to the upstream bug. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1077320#c2
This was fixed a while back. The dependency on ifconfig is a soft dependency now. Basically, our script tries different commands and falls back from one to another - https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/blob/stable-10.0.x/open-vm-tools/scripts/linux/network#L333.
Oh good. Should be as simple as swapping over this then https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/open-vm-tools/blob/master/f/open-vm-tools.spec#_87
'ifconfig' is addressed, I'm not sure what else is part of net-tools. A quick look at 'net-tools' suggests that there is nothing else that we need from this package. So, we should be able to replace it with 'iproute'. $ rpm -q net-tools net-tools-1.60-110.el6_2.x86_64 $ rpm -ql net-tools | grep bin /bin/dnsdomainname /bin/domainname /bin/hostname /bin/netstat /bin/nisdomainname /bin/ypdomainname /sbin/arp /sbin/ether-wake /sbin/ifconfig /sbin/ipmaddr /sbin/iptunnel /sbin/mii-diag /sbin/mii-tool /sbin/nameif /sbin/plipconfig /sbin/route /sbin/slattach
open-vm-tools-10.1.10-3.fc27 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 27. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2017-a2e8026b5b
open-vm-tools-10.1.10-3.fc26 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 26. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2017-8afe84892f
open-vm-tools-10.1.10-3.fc25 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 25. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2017-96fa50152d
open-vm-tools-10.1.10-3.fc27 has been pushed to the Fedora 27 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for instructions on how to install test updates. You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2017-a2e8026b5b
open-vm-tools-10.1.10-3.fc26 has been pushed to the Fedora 26 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for instructions on how to install test updates. You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2017-8afe84892f
open-vm-tools-10.1.10-3.fc25 has been pushed to the Fedora 25 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for instructions on how to install test updates. You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2017-96fa50152d
open-vm-tools-10.1.10-3.fc26 has been pushed to the Fedora 26 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
open-vm-tools-10.1.10-3.fc27 has been pushed to the Fedora 27 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
open-vm-tools-10.1.10-3.fc25 has been pushed to the Fedora 25 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.