Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd Edition

8CONFIGURING NETWORKING

Now that you know enough networking to be dangerous, you can configure a network connection. While FreeBSD supports many different protocols, we’ll focus on the nearly ubiquitous Ethernet connection, generally delivered over CAT5 or CAT6 cables.¹

We’ll start with the essentials for getting a host on the network and able to access other internet hosts. Raw TCP/IP connectivity isn’t enough, however; you also need the ability to resolve host names to IP addresses, so we’ll cover that next. Then we’ll talk about measuring network activity, performance, VLANs, and aggregating links.

Before you can do any of that, though, you ...