A Linux Sysadmin’s Guide to Network Management, Troubleshooting and Debugging

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A system administrator’s routine tasks include configuring, maintaining, troubleshooting, and managing servers and networks within data centers. There are numerous tools and utilities in Linux designed for administrative purposes.

In this article, we will review some of the most used command-line tools and utilities for network management in Linux, under different categories. We will explain some common usage examples, which will make network management much easier in Linux.

Network Configuration, Troubleshooting and Debugging Tools

1. ifconfig Command

ifconfig is a command line interface tool for network interface configuration and also used to initialize an interface at system boot time. Once a server is up and running, it can be used to assign an IP Address to an interface and enable or disable the interface on demand.

It is also used to view the status IP Address, Hardware / MAC address, as well as MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) size of the currently active interfaces. ifconfig is thus useful for debugging or performing system tuning.

Here is an example to display the status of all active network interfaces.

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