As promised, Joe Barr has returned with an introduction to the newer network commands in Linux. Specifically, he’s telling us about iproute2 and some of its basic commands to get information on running interfaces.

Unfortunately it doesn’t get very in depth, and mostly refers to the main pages beyond a few examples. The idea isn’t instruction, however, merely to explain what it’s all about and allow us to make an informed decision on whether it’s worth pursuing.

He mentions using it for more complex routing than with single interfaces, and I wish he would have given more examples in that respect. For the moment, however, it appears most home users will be just fine using the standard ifconfig and route commands. I’ll be installing a Linux-based firewall/router before long, though, so will probably dig in to iproute2 soon.

When I get to that point, I’ll let you know what I find.