In June 2011 the Arch Development team decided that network setup should be done with other tools then net-tools because net-tools is now deprecated. Why the flexible configuration scripts should be gone because of that is something that I and a lot of Arch users simply don’t know and understand. Init-scripts have nothing to do with the network tools, they simply should have been rewritten to use the iproute2 package.
The consequence of this is that complex network configurations like used in the Home Server articles on this site, are almost impossible to do with the “new” style of configuring. Add to that that the wiki still describes the old method (but it displays a warning now), and that some things are still not straitened out for the current packages, I decided to keep on using the old style scripts or a while.
In the download section you find the network-legacy package, which is nothing more then one script, /etc/rc.d/network-legacy that replaces the standard /etc/rc.d/network script. The standard script still works (for now), but it displays a warning about the good old configuration options and I think that they will remove the old support eventually.
When a good alternative solution comes up, or the documentation improves enough to use a new configuration method, then I will update the existing documentation on this site, but until then I keep on using the well working old method.