Linux Administration Cookbook

Discerning the IP

On a modern box, this is done with ip, which we'll go into greater depth with later:

$ ip address show

You can shorten ip commands to make them quicker to type (as we did in the previous chapter,) but in the preceding code I've used the full expression as it better expresses what we're doing.

This command will give you information about all the interfaces on your system. In the case of our VMs, it looks like this:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever    inet6 ::1/128 scope host        valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> ...