Chapter 2. Issues of TCP/IP Networking
In this chapter we turn to the configuration decisions you’ll need to make when connecting your Linux machine to a TCP/IP network, including dealing with IP addresses, hostnames, and routing issues. This chapter gives you the background you need in order to understand what your setup requires, while the next chapters cover the tools you will use.
To learn more about TCP/IP and the reasons behind it, refer to the three-volume set Internetworking with TCP/IP, by Douglas R. Comer (Prentice Hall). For a more detailed guide to managing a TCP/IP network, see TCP/IP Network Administration by Craig Hunt (O’Reilly).
Networking Interfaces
To hide the diversity of equipment that may be used in a networking environment, TCP/IP defines an abstract interface through which the hardware is accessed. This interface offers a set of operations that is the same for all types of hardware and basically deals with sending and receiving packets.
For each peripheral networking device, a corresponding interface has
to be present in the kernel. For example, Ethernet interfaces in Linux
are called by such names as eth0
and
eth1
; PPP (discussed in Chapter 8) interfaces are named ppp0
and ppp1
; and FDDI interfaces are given names
like fddi0
and fddi1
. These
interface names are used for configuration purposes when you want to
specify a particular physical device in a configuration command, and
they have no meaning beyond this use.
Before being used by TCP/IP networking, an ...
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