Chapter 6. Configuring the Interface

When networking protocols work only with a single kind of physical network, there is no need to identify the network interface to the software. The software knows what the interface must be; no configuration issues are left for the administrator. However, one important strength of TCP/IP is its flexible use of different physical networks. This flexibility adds complexity to the system administrator's task, because you must tell TCP/IP which interfaces to use, and you must define the characteristics of each interface.

Because TCP/IP is independent of the underlying physical network, IP addresses are implemented in the network softwarenot in the network hardware. Unlike Ethernet addresses, which are determined by the Ethernet hardware, the system administrator assigns an IP address to each network interface.

In this chapter, we use the ifconfig (interface configure) command to identify the network interface to TCP/IP and to assign the IP address, subnet mask, and broadcast address to the interface. We also configure a network interface to run Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), which is the standard Network Access Layer protocol used to run TCP/IP over modem connections.

During a real installation the system administrator is isolated from most of the details of the network configuration. The installation program prompts the administrator for information, places that information in script files, and then uses the scripts to configure the interface at every boot. In this chapter we look beyond the superficial to see how things actually work by examining the details of the ifconfig command and the scripts that invoke the command. Let's begin with a discussion of ifconfig.