Network management

This article lists network management software to establish and manage network connections.

Available software
Here are some network packages, along with their capabilities, that are available in Gentoo:

Installation
Network connectivity is needed in order to begin to manage networks. On most systems, connectivity will come through a wired or wireless network using a Network Interface Controller (NIC). Hundreds if not thousands of NICs are supported in Linux. All NICs require a kernel driver in order to talk to the Linux kernel. Some NICs, especially wireless NICs, require firmware in order to operate properly.

Kernel
Kernel support for wired (ethernet) network interfaces can be found under the following menuconfig path:

Kernel support for wireless (wifi) network interfaces can be found under this menuconfig path:

See the kernel configuration article for information on how to manually configure the kernel.

Firmware
If required by the hardware, install the package:

See the Linux firmware article for more information on Linux firmware.

Manual
The following commands can be used to configure network interfaces:


 * (deprecated)
 * (deprecated)

Which network interfaces are on the computer?

 * How to find out (lspci, lshw)?
 * "Predictable" interface naming. To get rid of it see Keep classic 'eth0' naming.
 * What are those in /sys/devices/virtual/net/ ?

Network device names,  , etc. as provided by the kernel could be changed on boot (see dmsg) by this certain eudev (or udev) rule: To keep the classic naming this rule can be overwritten with an equally named empty file in the  directory:

Persistent/Predictable interface naming

 * See the Wikipedia article Consistent Network Device Naming and this FreeDesktop.org article.
 * Network interface naming (AMD64 Handbook)