What is network configuration in linux

13 Linux Network Configuration and Troubleshooting Commands

Computers are connected in a network to exchange information or resources each other. Two or more computer connected through network media called computer network. There are number of network devices or media are involved to form computer network. Computer loaded with Linux Operating System can also be a part of network whether it is small or large network by its multitasking and multiuser natures. Maintaining of system and network up and running is a task of System / Network Administrator’s job. In this article we are going to review frequently used network configuration and troubleshoot commands in Linux.

Linux Network Configuration and Troubleshooting Commands

1. ifconfig

ifconfig (interface configurator) command is use to initialize an interface, assign IP Address to interface and enable or disable interface on demand. With this command you can view IP Address and Hardware / MAC address assign to interface and also MTU (Maximum transmission unit) size.

ifconfig with interface (eth0) command only shows specific interface details like IP Address, MAC Address etc. with -a options will display all available interface details if it is disable also.

Assigning IP Address and Gateway

Assigning an IP Address and Gateway to interface on the fly. The setting will be removed in case of system reboot.

Enable or Disable Specific Interface

To enable or disable specific Interface, we use example command as follows.

Enable eth0

Disable eth0

Setting MTU Size

By default MTU size is 1500. We can set required MTU size with below command. Replace XXXX with size.

Set Interface in Promiscuous mode

Network interface only received packets belongs to that particular NIC. If you put interface in promiscuous mode it will received all the packets. This is very useful to capture packets and analyze later. For this you may require superuser access.

2. PING Command

PING (Packet INternet Groper) command is the best way to test connectivity between two nodes. Whether it is Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN). Ping use ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) to communicate to other devices. You can ping host name of ip address using below command.

In Linux ping command keep executing until you interrupt. Ping with -c option exit after N number of request (success or error respond).

3. TRACEROUTE Command

traceroute is a network troubleshooting utility which shows number of hops taken to reach destination also determine packets traveling path. Below we are tracing route to global DNS server IP Address and able to reach destination also shows path of that packet is traveling.

4. NETSTAT Command

Netstat (Network Statistic) command display connection info, routing table information etc. To displays routing table information use option as -r.

For more examples of Netstat Command, please read our earlier article on 20 Netstat Command Examples in Linux.

5. DIG Command

Dig (domain information groper) query DNS related information like A Record, CNAME, MX Record etc. This command mainly use to troubleshoot DNS related query.

For more examples of Dig Command, please read the article on 10 Linux Dig Commands to Query DNS.

6. NSLOOKUP Command

nslookup command also use to find out DNS related query. The following examples shows A Record (IP Address) of tecmint.com.

For more NSLOOKUP Command, read the article on 8 Linux Nslookup Command Examples.

7. ROUTE Command

route command also shows and manipulate ip routing table. To see default routing table in Linux, type the following command.

Adding, deleting routes and default Gateway with following commands.

Route Adding

Route Deleting

Adding default Gateway

8. HOST Command

host command to find name to IP or IP to name in IPv4 or IPv6 and also query DNS records.

Using -t option we can find out DNS Resource Records like CNAME, NS, MX, SOA etc.

9. ARP Command

ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) is useful to view / add the contents of the kernel’s ARP tables. To see default table use the command as.

10. ETHTOOL Command

ethtool is a replacement of mii-tool. It is to view, setting speed and duplex of your Network Interface Card (NIC). You can set duplex permanently in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 with ETHTOOL_OPTS variable.

11. IWCONFIG Command

iwconfig command in Linux is use to configure a wireless network interface. You can see and set the basic Wi-Fi details like SSID channel and encryption. You can refer man page of iwconfig to know more.

12. HOSTNAME Command

hostname is to identify in a network. Execute hostname command to see the hostname of your box. You can set hostname permanently in /etc/sysconfig/network. Need to reboot box once set a proper hostname.

13. GUI tool system-config-network

Type system-config-network in command prompt to configure network setting and you will get nice Graphical User Interface (GUI) which may also use to configure IP Address, Gateway, DNS etc. as shown below image.

Linux GUI Network Configuration Tool

This article can be useful for day to day use of Linux Network administrator in Linux / Unix-like operating system. Kindly share through our comment box if we missed out.

If You Appreciate What We Do Here On TecMint, You Should Consider:

TecMint is the fastest growing and most trusted community site for any kind of Linux Articles, Guides and Books on the web. Millions of people visit TecMint! to search or browse the thousands of published articles available FREELY to all.

If you like what you are reading, please consider buying us a coffee ( or 2 ) as a token of appreciation.

We are thankful for your never ending support.

Источник

Network configuration

This article describes how to configure network connections on OSI layer 3 and above. Medium-specifics are handled in the /Ethernet and /Wireless subpages.

Contents

Check the connection

To troubleshoot a network connection, go through the following conditions and ensure that you meet them:

1. Your network interface is listed and enabled. Otherwise, check the device driver – see /Ethernet#Device driver or /Wireless#Device driver.
2. You are connected to the network. The cable is plugged in or you are connected to the wireless LAN.
3. Your network interface has an IP address.
4. Your routing table is correctly set up.
5. You can ping a local IP address (e.g. your default gateway).
6. You can ping a public IP address (e.g. 8.8.8.8 , which is a Google DNS server and is a convenient address to test with).
7. Check if you can resolve domain names (e.g. archlinux.org ).

This article or section needs expansion.

ping is used to test if you can reach a host.

For every reply you receive, the ping utility will print a line like the above. For more information see the ping(8) manual. Note that computers can be configured not to respond to ICMP echo requests. [1]

If you receive no reply, this may be related to your default gateway or your Internet Service Provider (ISP). You can run a traceroute to further diagnose the route to the host.

Network management

To set up a network connection, go through the following steps:

1. Ensure your network interface is listed and enabled.
2. Connect to the network. Plug in the Ethernet cable or connect to the wireless LAN.
3. Configure your network connection:
   • static IP address
   • dynamic IP address: use DHCP

net-tools

Arch Linux has deprecated net-tools in favor of iproute2 .[2]

Deprecated command	Replacement commands
arp	ip neighbor
ifconfig	ip address, ip link
netstat	ss
route	ip route

iproute2

iproute2 is a dependency of the base meta package and provides the ip(8) command-line interface, used to manage network interfaces, IP addresses and the routing table. Be aware that configuration made using ip will be lost after a reboot. For persistent configuration, you can use a network manager or automate ip commands using scripts and systemd units. Also note that ip commands can generally be abbreviated, for clarity they are however spelled out in this article.

Network interfaces

By default udev assigns names to your network interfaces using Predictable Network Interface Names, which prefixes interfaces names with en (wired/Ethernet), wl (wireless/WLAN), or ww (WWAN). See systemd.net-naming-scheme(7) .

Listing network interfaces

Both wired and wireless interface names can be found via ls /sys/class/net or ip link . Note that lo is the virtual loopback interface and not used in making network connections.

Wireless device names can also be retrieved using iw dev . See also /Wireless#Get the name of the interface.

If your network interface is not listed, make sure your device driver was loaded successfully. See /Ethernet#Device driver or /Wireless#Device driver.

Enabling and disabling network interfaces

Network interfaces can be enabled or disabled using ip link set interface up|down , see ip-link(8) .

To check the status of the interface enp2s0 :

The UP in
is what indicates the interface is up, not the later state DOWN .

Static or dynamic IP address?

This article or section needs language, wiki syntax or style improvements. See Help:Style for reference.

If you are using a Wi-FI or a router, for example, at home, you will most likely be using a dynamic IP address. The IP address is assigned by the Wi-Fi or router and it is what your computer should be configured to use. Or, if you are at home and your computer is connected to your ISP’s modem, for example, a cable modem, that will also be using a dynamic IP address. Dynamic IP addresses can change each time you turn your computer on. In a work environment you may have a static IP address or a dynamic IP address. At home you can configure your router to always assign your computer the same IP address in which case you are using a static IP address. When you are using a dynamic IP address you will need to use DHCP so that it can set up your network interface with the correct IP address. In addition to configuring your IP address, DHCP can also configure your routing (how to get from where you are to wherever on the network you are going) as well as your name servers, which convert the host name, for example, google.com, into its IP address, that number with dots in it.

Static IP address

A static IP address can be configured with most standard network managers and also dhcpcd.

To manually configure a static IP address, add an IP address as described in #IP addresses, set up your routing table and configure your DNS servers.

IP addresses

List IP addresses:

Add an IP address to an interface:

Note that:

• the address is given in CIDR notation to also supply a subnet mask
• + is a special symbol that makes ip derive the broadcast address from the IP address and the subnet mask

Delete an IP address from an interface:

Delete all addresses matching a criteria, e.g. of a specific interface:

Routing table

The routing table is used to determine if you can reach an IP address directly or what gateway (router) you should use. If no other route matches the IP address, the default gateway is used.

The routing table is managed using ip-route(8) .

PREFIX is either a CIDR notation or default for the default gateway.

List IPv4 routes:

List IPv6 routes:

A Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server provides clients with a dynamic IP address, the subnet mask, the default gateway IP address and optionally also with DNS name servers.

To use DHCP you need a DHCP server in your network and a DHCP client:

Client	Package	Archiso	Note	Systemd units
dhcpcd	dhcpcd	Yes	DHCP, DHCPv6, ZeroConf, static IP	dhcpcd.service , dhcpcd@interface.service
ISC dhclient	dhclient	Yes	DHCP, DHCPv6, BOOTP, static IP	dhclient@interface.service

Servers

This article or section needs expansion.

Server	Package	IPv4	IPv6	GUI	Interfaces	Storage backend(s)	Note
dhcpd	dhcp	Yes	Yes	Glass-ISC-DHCP	?	File
dnsmasq	dnsmasq	Yes	Yes	No	?	File	Also DNS, PXE and TFTP
Kea	kea	Yes	Yes	Kea-Anterius (Experimental)	REST, RADIUS and NETCONF	File, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Cassandra	Also DNS

Network managers

A network manager lets you manage network connection settings in so called network profiles to facilitate switching networks.

Network manager	GUI	Archiso [3]	CLI tools	PPP support (e.g. 3G modem)	DHCP client	systemd units
ConnMan	8 unofficial	No	connmanctl(1)	Yes (with ofono AUR )	internal	connman.service
netctl	2 unofficial	No	netctl(1) , wifi-menu	Yes	dhcpcd or dhclient	netctl-ifplugd@interface.service , netctl-auto@interface.service
NetworkManager	Yes	No	nmcli(1) , nmtui(1)	Yes	internal or dhclient	NetworkManager.service
systemd-networkd	No	Yes ( base )	networkctl(1)	No	internal	systemd-networkd.service , systemd-resolved.service
Wicd	Yes	No	wicd-cli(8) , wicd-curses(8)	No	dhcpcd or dhclient	wicd.service

Set the hostname

This article or section needs language, wiki syntax or style improvements. See Help:Style for reference.

A hostname is a unique name created to identify a machine on a network, configured in /etc/hostname —see hostname(5) and hostname(7) for details. The file can contain the system’s domain name, if any. To set the hostname, edit /etc/hostname to include a single line with myhostname :

To temporarily set the hostname (until reboot), use hostname(1) from inetutils :

To set the «pretty» hostname and other machine metadata, see machine-info(5) .

Local hostname resolution

This article or section needs expansion.

nss-myhostname(8) (an NSS module provided by systemd) provides local hostname resolution without having to edit /etc/hosts . It is enabled by default.

Some software may however still read /etc/hosts directly, see [4] [5] for examples. To prevent them from potentially breaking, hanging or otherwise delaying operation, make sure they can resolve the local hostname and localhost by configuring the hosts(5) file:

For a system with a permanent IP address, replace 127.0.1.1 with that permanent IP address. For a system with a fully qualified domain name, insert the fully qualified domain name before the hostname. For example:

As a result the system resolves to both entries:

Local network hostname resolution

To make your machine accessible in your LAN via its hostname you can:

• edit the /etc/hosts file for every device in your LAN, see hosts(5)
• set up a DNS server to resolve your hostname and make the LAN devices use it (e.g. via #DHCP)
• or the easy way: use a Zero-configuration networking service:
  • Hostname resolution via Microsoft’s NetBIOS. Provided by Samba on Linux. It only requires the nmb.service . Computers running Windows, macOS, or Linux with nmb running, will be able to find your machine.
  • Hostname resolution via mDNS. Provided by either nss_mdns with Avahi (see Avahi#Hostname resolution for setup details) or systemd-resolved. Computers running macOS, or Linux with Avahi or systemd-resolved running, will be able to find your machine. The older Win32 API does not support mDNS, which may prevent some older Windows applications from accessing your device.

Tips and tricks

Change interface name

You can change the device name by defining the name manually with an udev-rule. For example:

These rules will be applied automatically at boot.

A couple of things to note:

• To get the MAC address of each card, use this command: cat /sys/class/net/device_name/address
• Make sure to use the lower-case hex values in your udev rules. It does not like upper-case.

If the network card has a dynamic MAC, you can use DEVPATH , for example:

To get the DEVPATH of all currently-connected devices, see where the symlinks in /sys/class/net/ lead. For example:

The device path should match both the new and old device name, since the rule may be executed more than once on bootup. For example, in the second rule, «/devices/pci*/*1c.0/*/net/enp*» would be wrong since it will stop matching once the name is changed to en . Only the system-default rule will fire the second time around, causing the name to be changed back to e.g. enp1s0 .

If you are using a USB network device (e.g. Android phone tethering) that has a dynamic MAC address and you want to be able to use different USB ports, you could use a rule that matched depending on vendor and product ID instead:

To test your rules, they can be triggered directly from userspace, e.g. with udevadm —debug test /sys/class/net/* . Remember to first take down the interface you are trying to rename (e.g. ip link set enp1s0 down ).

Revert to traditional interface names

If you would prefer to retain traditional interface names such as eth0, Predictable Network Interface Names can be disabled by masking the udev rule:

Alternatively, add net.ifnames=0 to the kernel parameters.

Set device MTU and queue length

You can change the device MTU and queue length by defining manually with an udev-rule. For example:

mtu : Using a value larger than 1500 (so called jumbo frames) can significantly speed up your network transfers. Note that all network interfaces, including switches in the local network, must support the same MTU in order to use jumbo frames. For PPPoE, the MTU should not be larger than 1492. You can also set MTU via systemd.netdev(5) .

tx_queue_len : Small value for slower devices with a high latency like modem links and ISDN. High value is recommended for server connected over the high-speed internet connections that perform large data transfers.

Bonding or LAG

IP address aliasing

IP aliasing is the process of adding more than one IP address to a network interface. With this, one node on a network can have multiple connections to a network, each serving a different purpose. Typical uses are virtual hosting of Web and FTP servers, or reorganizing servers without having to update any other machines (this is especially useful for nameservers).

Example

To manually set an alias, for some NIC, use iproute2 to execute

To remove a given alias execute

Packets destined for a subnet will use the primary alias by default. If the destination IP is within a subnet of a secondary alias, then the source IP is set respectively. Consider the case where there is more than one NIC, the default routes can be listed with ip route .

Promiscuous mode

Toggling promiscuous mode will make a (wireless) NIC forward all traffic it receives to the OS for further processing. This is opposite to «normal mode» where a NIC will drop frames it is not intended to receive. It is most often used for advanced network troubleshooting and packet sniffing.

If you want to enable promiscuous mode on interface eth0 run enable promiscuous@eth0.service .

Investigate sockets

ss is a utility to investigate network ports and is part of the iproute2 package. It has a similar functionality to the deprecated netstat utility.

Common usage includes:

Display all TCP Sockets with service names:

Display all TCP Sockets with port numbers:

Display all UDP Sockets:

For more information see ss(8) .

Troubleshooting

The TCP window scaling problem

TCP packets contain a «window» value in their headers indicating how much data the other host may send in return. This value is represented with only 16 bits, hence the window size is at most 64KiB. TCP packets are cached for a while (they have to be reordered), and as memory is (or used to be) limited, one host could easily run out of it.

Back in 1992, as more and more memory became available, RFC 1323 was written to improve the situation: Window Scaling. The «window» value, provided in all packets, will be modified by a Scale Factor defined once, at the very beginning of the connection. That 8-bit Scale Factor allows the Window to be up to 32 times higher than the initial 64KiB.

It appears that some broken routers and firewalls on the Internet are rewriting the Scale Factor to 0 which causes misunderstandings between hosts. The Linux kernel 2.6.17 introduced a new calculation scheme generating higher Scale Factors, virtually making the aftermaths of the broken routers and firewalls more visible.

The resulting connection is at best very slow or broken.

How to diagnose the problem

First of all, let us make it clear: this problem is odd. In some cases, you will not be able to use TCP connections (HTTP, FTP, . ) at all and in others, you will be able to communicate with some hosts (very few).

When you have this problem, the output from dmesg is okay, logs are clean and ip addr will report normal status. and actually everything appears normal.

If you cannot browse any website, but you can ping some random hosts, chances are great that you are experiencing this problem: ping uses ICMP and is not affected by TCP problems.

You can try to use Wireshark. You might see successful UDP and ICMP communications but unsuccessful TCP communications (only to foreign hosts).

Ways of fixing it

To fix it the bad way, you can change the tcp_rmem value, on which Scale Factor calculation is based. Although it should work for most hosts, it is not guaranteed, especially for very distant ones.

Simply disable Window Scaling. Since Window Scaling is a nice TCP feature, it may be uncomfortable to disable it, especially if you cannot fix the broken router. There are several ways to disable Window Scaling, and it seems that the most bulletproof way (which will work with most kernels) is to add the following line to /etc/sysctl.d/99-disable_window_scaling.conf (see also sysctl):

This problem is caused by broken routers/firewalls, so let us change them. Some users have reported that the broken router was their very own DSL router.

More about it

This section is based on the LWN article TCP window scaling and broken routers and an archived Kernel Trap article: Window Scaling on the Internet.

There are also several relevant threads on the LKML.

Connected second PC unable to use bridged LAN

First PC have two LAN. Second PC have one LAN and connected to first PC. Lets go second PC to give all access to LAN after bridged interface:

This article or section needs expansion.

Источник