Linux Networking/IP- and Ethernet-Related Information

This section covers information specific to Ethernet and IP. These subsections have been grouped together because I think they are the most interesting ones in the formerly-called Technology Specific Section. Anyone with a LAN should be able to benefit from these goodies.

Ethernet

Ethernet device names are `eth0', `eth1', `eth2' etc. The first card detected by the kernel is assigned `eth0' and the rest are assigned sequentially in the order they are detected. By default, the Linux kernel only probes for one Ethernet device, you need to pass command line arguments to the kernel in order to force detection of further boards.

To learn how to make your ethernet card(s) working under Linux you should refer to the Ethernet-HOWTO.

Once you have your kernel properly built to support your ethernet card then configuration of the card is easy.

Typically you would use something like (which most distributions already do for you, if you configured them to support your ethernet):

            root# ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
            root# route add -net 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth0

Most of the ethernet drivers were developed by Donald Becker, becker@CESDIS.gsfc.nasa.gov.