Conclusion

You've covered a wide selection of networking tools in this chapter. Many of them, such as ifconfig, iwconfig, and route, can perform double duty, both informing you about the status of your connectivity and allowing you to change the parameters of your connections. Others are used more for diagnostic purposes, such as ping, traceroute, and host. Finally, some govern your ability to connect to a network at all: dhclient, ifup, and ifdown. If you're serious about Linux, you're going to need to learn all of them. There's nothing more frustrating than a network connection that won't work, but often the right program can fix that problem in a matter of seconds. Know your tools well, and you can fix issues quickly and efficiently as they arise.