In this chapter, we walk you through all the necessary steps to set up
TCP/IP networking on your machine. Starting with the assignment of IP
addresses, we slowly work our way through the configuration of TCP/IP
network interfaces and introduce a few tools that come in handy when
hunting down network installation problems.
Most of the tasks covered in this chapter will generally have to be
done only once. Afterward, you have to touch most configuration files
only when adding a new system to your network or when you reconfigure
your system entirely. Some of the commands used to configure TCP/IP,
however, have to be executed each time the system is booted. This is
usually done by invoking them from the system
/etc/rc* scripts.
Commonly, the network-specific part of this procedure is contained in
a script. The name of this script varies in different Linux
distributions. In many older Linux distributions, it is known as
rc.net or rc.inet. Sometimes
you will also see two scripts named rc.inet1 and
rc.inet2 ; the former initializes the
kernel part of networking and the latter starts basic networking
services and applications. In modern distributions, the
rc files are structured in a more sophisticated
arrangement; here you may find scripts in the
/etc/init.d/ (or
/etc/rc.d/init.d/ ) directory that create
the network devices and other rc files that run
the network application programs. This book's examples are based on
the latter arrangement.
This chapter discusses parts of the script that configure your network
interfaces, while applications will be covered in later chapters.
After finishing this chapter, you should have established a sequence
of commands that properly configure TCP/IP networking on your
computer. You should then replace any sample commands in your
configuration scripts with your commands, make sure the script is
executed from the basic rc script at startup
time, and reboot your machine. The networking rc
scripts that come along with your favorite Linux distribution should
provide a solid example from which to work.
