Category: Networking

How To: Show Your Network Interfaces

Today’s article will be fairly simple, where we learn a couple of ways how to show your network interfaces. It won’t be a very long article, nor will it be all that complicated. Like almost always, today’s article will involve the terminal. So, if you want to learn how to show your network interfaces, read on!

A network interface is what’s used to connect your computer to a network. Depending on your configuration, you may have both real and virtual network interfaces. The real network interfaces will be things like your ethernet (the wired connection to the network) and a wireless device (a radio-controlled network interface).

There are times when you’ll want to know your network interface, be it for debugging or monitoring. For example, you’ll probably want to know about your network interfaces if you’re playing around with VNStat.

We’ve probably touched on this subject in a few articles. However, we might as well have an article specifically answering the question of how to show your network interfaces. Well, then, that’s what this article will cover.

Show Your Network Interfaces:

As mentioned in the intro, we’re going to be using the terminal. If you’re a regular reader, you’re probably used to it and a little tired of the same old text. Not all my readers are going to be as proficient, so they should know that they can just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, your next step mostly depends on your chosen distro and the age of the default installed tools. If you’re using an older distro, you can go with this command:

If you’re using a distro with more current tools, you will likely find that ‘ifconfig’ has been deprecated, that is no longer current and in use. For you folks, you’ll need a slightly longer command:

So, if you want to show your network interfaces, one of those two commands will likely get you there. You should check the information carefully, to make sure you’re using the correct information, such as when you want to use a network interface name for another command.

Closure:

There you have it… You have another article! This time, we’ve decided to spend some time learning how to show your network interfaces. It’s nothing complicated, but it’s still useful information. It is indeed a fairly short and simple article, but that means newer users can follow along – which is a good thing. I’m sure there are other ways to gather this information, but one of those two commands should do the trick!

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Limit The Download Speed For ‘wget’

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to limit the download speed for ‘wget’. It will be a short article because I’m watching a race and didn’t bother writing an article ahead of time. It’ll also be suitable for someone new to ‘wget’. So, to learn how to limit the download speed for ‘wget’, read on!

We’ve had a number of ‘wget’ articles in the past. There’s quite a bit to it. If you don’t know, you use ‘wget’ in the terminal, as a way to transfer files across a network. The ‘wget’ command is often used to download files from the internet. If you’re unfamiliar with the ‘wget’ command, it defines itself as:

Wget – The non-interactive network downloader.

There are a number of existing ‘wget’ articles if you want to gain some familiarity with the command. Here’s some:

Rename A File Downloaded With ‘wget’
How To: Hide The Output From wget
Make wget Use IPv4 or IPv6
How To: Make ‘wget’ Ignore Certificate Errors

Plus, there are numerous articles that used wget to download files.

So, when you’ve taken a look at those articles and feel you have a solid grasp of what ‘wget’ is used for, you might as well take a look at the man page to get a better idea of the possibilities:

With that information properly learned or refreshed, let’s just skip right ahead to the main article…

Limit The Download Speed For ‘wget’:

It’s a bit different lately, as I’ve been using a different ISP. In the past, if I was downloading anything the whole network would bog down. I’d use things like ‘wondershaper‘ to get around that. Else, if I was using ‘wget’ to download a large file, I’d limit the download speed.

This isn’t much of an issue with my current connection, so I don’t worry about it. Still, you might have all sorts of reasons to limit the download speed for ‘wget’. We can do that! You will need an open terminal, however. 

So, open up your default terminal emulator. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

If you don’t know what we’re looking for, we’re looking for the --limit-rate flag. It’s not all that complicated and looks like this:

For example:

Where you see 50k, you can change it to 100k, 500k, or whatever. The k obviously stands for kilobytes. You can also use m, as in --limit-rate=50m and that’s obviously megabytes. If you’ve got enough bandwidth for it to matter, you can even use a g in that space, and it’s obviously for gigabytes.

See? That’s actually all there is to it. I told you it was simple and quick! Tada! It was!

Closure:

And there’s another article. This one was hurried but hopefully is worth reading and sharing with your online friends. You’ll have learned that you can limit the download speed for ‘wget’, a potentially handy way to use the tool. You can combine it with the various other flags, so be sure to read the man page!

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Bring Your Network Up Or Down (In The Terminal)

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to bring your network up or down – in the terminal, of course. This will be an article that’s easy enough for a beginner to understand. It’s not very complicated, so it should also be fairly short. If you’re interested in bringing your network up or down in the terminal, read on!

There are times when you may want to bring your network down and then bring it back up. Odds are that you can do this with a GUI, often with a network manager right there in your system tray.

You can also do this in the terminal. This is especially handy if we’re unable to reach a graphical state and need a network connection for things like updating and troubleshooting. We will use the ‘ip’ command for this, which is a pretty robust command. The ‘ip’ command describes itself as:

ip – show / manipulate routing, network devices, interfaces and tunnels

That’s an accurate description and we will indeed be manipulating network interfaces in this article. We will also be showing network interfaces in this article.

If you’d like to get a head start, you can read the man page:

That command will show you all the available options for the ‘ip’ command. We’ll just be using a couple of the commands, so it won’t be all that complicated or stressful.

Bring Your Network Up Or Down:

As the title suggests, we’ll be managing our network interfaces from the terminal. This means you’ll need to open your favorite terminal emulator at this point. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, you should identify your network interfaces. We can do this with the ‘ip’ command, like so:

Or just:

Hint: The connected device(s) will be those with the most information output. Like the wireless network interface in the following image:

output of the 'ip addr' command
As you can guess, that rectangle is a good indicator that it’s the ‘up’ network interface.

Now, if the network interface is down and you want to bring it up. The command is quite simple, it’s just:

So, in my case, the command would look like this:

If you wanted to bring it down, and mine is already up, the command would look like this:

With that, you can bring your network up or down as desired, and from the terminal. It’s not very difficult at all.

If you’re using an older distro, you might still be using ‘ifconfig’. If you are, the commands are a little different, and I include these only for completeness’ sake and would look like this:

And, of course, to bring the network interface down:

So, that’s not too dissimilar to the more modern ‘ip’ command and is still worth mentioning. For a while, as ‘ifconfig’ was sunsetted, you could use both commands with the Ubuntu flavors. In current versions of Ubuntu, you only have the ‘ip’ command available unless you install ‘net-tools’ for some reason.

Closure:

And there you have it! You can now bring your network up or down in the terminal, and it’s not even all that difficult. It’s yet another article and yet another skill you can add to your growing toolbox of commands. It’s just a subset of the things you can do with the ‘ip’ command, but it’s one of the more useful things you can do with it. So, there’s that…

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Rename A File Downloaded With ‘wget’

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to rename a file downloaded with ‘wget’. This will not be a complicated article. It will also be a pretty short article. If you want to learn how to rename a file downloaded with ‘wget’, read on and you’ll see how!

Often, you’ll use ‘wget’ to download a file and it will have some sort of convoluted file name. You can download a file with ‘wget’ and rename it automatically. If this is something you’re interested in doing, we’ll learn how to do it in this article.

We’ve used ‘wget before. See:

How To: Hide The Output From wget
Make wget Use IPv4 or IPv6
How To: Make ‘wget’ Ignore Certificate Errors

We’ve used ‘wget’ in other articles, so feel free to use the search function to see the other articles about ‘wget’.

If you’re curious, you can check the man page. You’ll see ‘wget’ defines itself as:

Wget – The non-interactive network downloader.

That’s a good enough description, I suppose. Basically, you use ‘wget’ in the terminal to download files. It’s a pretty handy application and, importantly, a pretty universal application. If you’re using a GNU/Linux desktop (or server), you’ve almost certainly got ‘wget’ as an available tool.

So then…

Rename A File Downloaded With ‘wget’:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Let’s ensure you have ‘wget’ installed with:

If ‘wget’ is not installed, install it from your package manager. Once installed, you can take it on a test run:

Now, we’re going to make ‘wget’ keep trying in case the download has issues. We’ll use the -c (continue) flag:

You probably don’t need the -c flag for this file, but it’s a good habit to get into. If we add the -O flag (for output-document) to the command, it’d look like this:

Or, to try to make it more clear:

In the latter example, you’ll have downloaded the file and renamed it to numbers.txt instead of saving it as the original filename. See? Pretty simple!

Closure:

There you have it. You have a new article. This time, we’ve learned how to rename a file downloaded with wget. It’s a handy trick to keep in mind, as people tend to want to give their files names with things like version information and all that. If you want a simpler file name, this is a nice easy way to do it.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Control Your WiFi With ‘rfkill’ And More

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to control your WiFi with ‘rfkill’ and we’ll be learning a bit more than that. I think you’ll find ‘rfkill’ to be a nifty and useful terminal-based command to learn. Is this article appropriate for a beginner? Maybe? Maybe not? I’ll do my best to make it approachable for anyone at any level.

By the way, I’ve decided to intersperse the articles about simple commands like ‘lsusb’. I don’t want to bore my more advanced readers – and I don’t want to bore myself. I’ve decided to make the time necessary, even though I’m pretty busy. I’ll be busy for a little more than a week. (Ask me in private, if you want.)

Anyhow, you should learn about ‘rfkill’, as it’s a pretty handy tool for controlling your wireless. If you look at the name, there should be some indication that it’s actually more than just WiFi. You can use ‘rfkill’ to manage Bluetooth, for example. Bluetooth is also wireless communication. As such, you can use ‘rfkill’ to manage that as well.

So, what is ‘rfkill’? Let’s see how the man page defines it:

rfkill – tool for enabling and disabling wireless devices

See? It says what you’d expect, assuming you read the previous paragraph. The title only mentions WiFi, but that’s really due to space and convenience. You can use ‘rfkill’ to manage both WiFi and Bluetooth. Pretty handy, huh?

Well then, let’s just get the party started…

Control Your WiFi with ‘rfkill’:

Sure enough, you use ‘rfkill’ in the terminal. On Linux-Tips.us, we do a whole lot of stuff in the terminal. So, open your terminal now. If you don’t know how to open your terminal, just press CTRL + ALT + T and your terminal should just pop open.

With your terminal now open, let’s first gather some information:

The output should look a little bit like this, or a lot like this:

gathering information with rfkill
The output should be fairly easy to understand for my delightful readers! I have faith in you!

The information you’re after “ID,TYPE-DESC,SOFT,HARD” is easy to understand. 

The first column is the ID number and the second column is a description of the device. The third column is if there’s a ‘soft block’ on the device, and the fourth column is if there’s a ‘hard block’ on the device.

If you see a ‘soft block’, that’s when there’s some software that disabled the device. A ‘hard block’ is when there’s a hardware block on the device. If it is soft blocked, you’ll need a software solution to turn it on – like ‘rfkill’.

Additionally, when you see a ‘hard block’, it means there’s probably a physical switch (often an Fn + F* key combination, perhaps labeled something like ‘Airplane Mode’) that is keeping the device powered off. You need to physically enable the device to make it work.

Importantly, the ‘rfkill’ application can do nothing about a hard block. But, it can do something about a soft block. If you want to unblock WiFi, try this:

Using my computer’s output, to unblock the WiFi the command would be:

You can also unblock with the description. To unblock the WiFi with the description looks like:

Of course,  you can also do the opposite. Instead of ‘unblock’ you would use ‘block’. That means the opposite of the above command would be:

If you want, you can also just ‘toggle’ the devices. When you toggle it, it turns off if it was on – and it turns on if it was off. You do that with the ID. If I wanted to toggle the wireless, the command would look like:

That will turn my WiFi off (if it was on) or it will turn my WiFi on (if it was currently turned off). See? It’s pretty simple!

Well, I hope I’ve made it simple. If it’s not simple, I hope it’s at least approachable. Like always, feel free to drop a question as a comment. If I don’t have an answer, I’ll try to direct you to someone who does.

Also, don’t be afraid of the man page. There’s a lot more to ‘rfkill’ than I’ve covered in this article. We’ve mostly just scratched the surface. To check the man page:

That’ll give you all the information you want. Plus, I’m sure others have authored pages that will go into more depth. We tend to not do too much of that here. I just want you to be up and running, not Linux gurus. If you want to be a Linux guru, you’ll need a whole lot more than just this site!

Closure:

Well, I’m glad you made it through today’s article. I tried to keep it nice and simple, simply showing you a way to control your WiFi with ‘rfkill’. But, there’s more to it, including Bluetooth. I like to think I’ve made this approachable for even a new user, but maybe not…

Again, feel free to comment about this. Is it easy enough for a new person? How about a new person coming from a Google search? Is it easy enough for a novice, someone completely new to computers? (Probably not, but let me know what you think. Thanks!)

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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