From the course: CompTIA Linux+ (XK0-005) Cert Prep

Linux networking overview - Linux Tutorial

From the course: CompTIA Linux+ (XK0-005) Cert Prep

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Linux networking overview

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- [Instructor] There are a certain number of items that need to be configured in order for Linux to have functional networking. A host address, usually this is an IP version four or IP version six address. Network subnet mask to define the network. Default gateway router address so traffic can leave the local network. A hostname to identify your host and name resolution so you can refer to other hosts by name instead of needing to remember IP addresses. This could be local name resolution or through a remote server such as DNS. The network configuration can be set dynamically via the dynamic host configuration protocol, or by using IP version six. If using DHCP your host computer sends out a request for networking configuration, and the server answers the request and sends a configuration back. You can also set the live configuration manually. This means you assign a host address, network subnet mask, default gateway etcetera in RAM. If you reboot the settings will return to the saved configuration. There are two sets of tools for configuring a live network configuration manually. The first being the lite-seen net-tools. You may be familiar with these tools as they include: ARP, hostname, ifconfig, route, and netstat. Most distributions still allow you to install them, and you should be comfortable with them as they are still prevalent. However they have been obsoleted by iproute2, and there will be no further development of net-tools. Net-tool's replacement is iproute2. For the foreseeable future distributions will ship with iproute2. So if you have not started using iproute2 yet I recommend that you do so. We'll be focusing on these tools in this course. If you want your network configuration to survive a reboot you need to edit the saved configuration. Distributions store their configuration files in different locations, and even in a multitude of different file formats. Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions version eight and older save their network configuration files in slash etc slash sysconfig slash network dash scripts. This directory can still be used although in a current distribution it will be empty. Debian-based distributions store their network configuration in the slash etc slash network slash interfaces file. SUSE stores it's network configuration file using a mixture paths from the other two at slash etc slash sysconfig slash network. Different distributions handling network configuration differently isn't a problem if you only use one distribution, but if you're in a mixed environment, which most are, then you have to remember how to create different configuration files and where to store them. To be honest it can be a bit of a mess! The most successful attempt at unifying Linux networking has been Network Manager. Network Manager is a network service and provides a unified system for configuring network interfaces. It was started in by Red Hat in 2004 and has been adopted by most distributions. It has both command-line and graphical interfaces. I believe it makes the most sense to cover these different methods of configuring Linux networking individually.

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