Network management

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

Gentoo provides several tools for managing network connections. If you have emerged OpenRc without network support, i.e. with both USE flags and  disabled, you might need to set up a network manager such as net-misc/netifrc, net-misc/dhcpcd, net-misc/wicd, net-misc/networkmanager, or. Or, you have the option of emerging openrc with the use flag and configuring  and  if you only use static interfaces.

The easiest to use is dhcpcd. It has perfect integration for wpa_supplicant and automatically switches between wired and wireless connections. In case of using dhcpcd as network manager, the USE flags netifrc and newnet may be deactivated in OpenRC.

Gentoo's standard however for network management is using Gentoo net.* scripts aka netifrc.

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:

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)?
 * What are those in ?

Persistent/Predictable interface naming

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