Configuring Network Features

You need five main pieces of information to configure your Linux system to interact on a network:

  • The host address

  • The network subnet address

  • The default router (sometimes called gateway)

  • The system hostname

  • A Domain Name System (DNS) server address for resolving hostnames

There are three different ways to configure this information in Linux systems:

  • Manually editing network configuration files

  • Using a graphical tool included with your Linux distribution

  • Using command-line tools

The following sections walk through each of these methods.

Network Configuration Files

Every Linux distribution uses network configuration files to define the network settings required to communicate on the network. Unfortunately, there’s ...

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