Chapter 14. Connectivity

Networking has been part of Linux since the OS's beginning as a humble kernel hacked on by a small group of programmers, and it's completely central to what makes Linux great. Linux networking most of the time just works, providing you with a rock-solid connection that can be endlessly tweaked and tuned to meet your exact needs.

This chapter is all about testing, measuring, and managing your networking devices and connections. When things are working correctlyand they will for the vast majority of the timeyou can use the tools in this chapter to monitor your system's network connections; should you experience problems, this chapter will help you resolve some of the most irksome.

Tip

The information in this chapter assumes that you're using IPv4 addressing, in the format of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. IPv6 will eventually replace IPv4, but that's still quite a while in the future. At that time, route and many of the other commands you'll be examining will change. For now, though, the information in this chapter is what you need. For more on IPv6, see Wikipedia's "IPv6" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6).