Tag: ip

Learn About Your Wireless Connection

Many of us rely on a wireless connection for our connectivity and this is for those who want to learn about your wireless connection. It should be a relatively simple article. Though, if you do not use wireless internet this won’t be very interesting.

Today’s article about your wireless connection will show you how to learn things like the quality of your connection, the transmission power, the frequency you’re using, and other sundry wireless bits. It’s a bit technical, and we will learn about your wireless connection in the terminal, but it’s all good information and not very complicated.

The tools we’ll be using should be installed in all current major distros. For example, we won’t use ifconfig because it is deprecated. We’ll be using the ip command instead. We’ll also be using iwconfig in this article. You shouldn’t need to install anything for this article. All the tools you need should be installed by default.

Side note: The site sure does load fast without ads! I’ll be finding a new ad provider soon enough, I just haven’t done so yet. I may appeal to Google. We shall see, but the site sure is fast! Alas, it generates no income to offset my expenses. So, we will have ads again. It’s going to happen.

As for the tools we’ll be using…

The IP Command:

The first tool we’ll use will be the ip command. As I mentioned above, the ifconfig tool has been deprecated. It is no longer supported and we’ve moved on to bigger and better things. Most major distros will have made this change. For a bit of completeness sake, I’ll include details for the old way.

You can verify that the ip command is available with this command:

If you check the man page, with man ip command, you’ll see that this is the correct tool for the job. The job is what was indicated in the article’s title. Anyhow, the ip command is described like this:

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

We’ll be using the command to identify the name of your wireless connection. It’s easy enough and you can easily follow along.

The IWCONFIG Command:

The iwconfig command is how we’ll be gathering information about your wireless connection. You should find that you don’t have to install anything for this. If you’re using a major distro that’s modern, you’ll almost certainly have iwconfig available. You can confirm that iwconfig is available with this command:

Just like we did above, you can run the man iwconfig command to see that this is the tool for the job. The output should include the following:

In our case, we won’t be doing any configuration – but we will be using this command to learn about the wireless connection. It’s a handy tool, but we’ll just be using it to gather data.

So, let’s get into the actual article itself…

Learn About Your Wireless Connection:

I mentioned above that this is something you do in the terminal. You probably know how to open your terminal by now. If not, you can usually press CTRL + ALT + T to open up your default terminal.

With your terminal now open, you can check your network connections. The purpose of this command is to learn which of your connection names is the correct one for your wireless connection.

If you’re using an older system, and some modern systems still contain the command, you can use the deprecated ifconfig like so:

Scroll through that data to find your wireless connection. It’ll begin with a W. It used to have a nice simple name by default, but times have changed. In my case, it looks like this:

In this case, you can see that the name of my wireless device is wlxe4beed0e5f5c. Unless you’ve renamed them, your wireless connection should start with a W and should be the only connection that starts with a W.

With that information in hand, you’ll next want to learn about your wireless connection with the iwconfig command. The syntax is quite simple:

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

The output would look like this (in my case):

From there, you can see the access point you’re connected to. You can find out the bit rate, frequency, and power management status of the device, and much more. See? Pretty easy.

HINT: If you don’t want all that information, you can always pipe it through grep. That’s pretty simple:

An example output would be:

This is a quick and easy way to learn about your wireless connection. It’s something that’s not too difficult and something everyone can practice to get a little bit more comfortable working in the Linux terminal.

Closure:

Someone asked if I was running out of ideas for articles. I do not believe I am. There’s just so much to write about and so many things that are worth covering. Today we’re learning about your wireless connection. Tomorrow we’ll be on to something else. And that’s okay… 

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Show A Specific Networking Interface

Today, I’m just going to write about a simple task, how to show a specific networking interface. This seems like a good short article.  It won’t be too complicated and it’s suitable for a beginner. Read on, if you are interested in learning how to get the information for just a specific networking interface.

It’s also suitable for most people, as most people only need information from a single, specific networking interface. Most folks reading this site are home users of Linux and it’s quite likely that they’re only connecting over one network interface, be it ethernet or wifi. Frequently, you only need to show a specific networking interface when gathering information from the terminal.

If you’re still using ‘ifconfig’ you can close this tab immediately. The tool is deprecated and we’ll just be using the ‘ip’ command. Odds are good that your distro has already moved away and is using the ip command. If your distro hasn’t done so, it should be noted that the process of deprecating ‘net-tools’ (from which you get ifconfig) started in like 2001. You may still have the legacy tool, but we won’t be covering it.

Anyhow…

That’s a long intro for something this short…

Show A Specific Networking Interface:

This is yet another article that requires an open terminal. So, crack open your favorite terminal. 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 open, you can run the following command:

You can even run:

Or, you can get that information for a specific networking interface. To do so, we just use the first command, like so:

For example, if your NIC is called ‘eth0’, the command would look like this:

The output from that command will be just the information about that specific networking interface. You won’t have the clutter of the first two commands listed and it will only show the device you specify. If you’ve only got one network interface in use, you can just store the final command in your memory for when you need to check some of your networking information.

Closure:

See? I told you that it’d be quick and easy. Not all of these articles need to be long and complicated. Besides, my 2-year anniversary is coming up, meaning a short and simple article is a good thing. I don’t want to burn out or anything, not at this stage of the game.

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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…

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Find Your Network Interface Name

There are all sorts of reasons why you might want to know your network interface name. It comes in handy with things like ‘vnstat‘, for example. In fact, I wrote an article about changing the network interface name. (There’s sometimes a reason why I write articles in the order I write ’em!)

Like I said, you may want to know this information for other purposes. In your general day-to-day computing, the network interface name is entirely unimportant. As you’ve seen from previous articles, it may come to pass that you need to know the name and this article will explain how to find that.

Anyhow, this one is quick and easy. I’m just going to show you some easy ways to find your network interface name. This should be pretty brief and simple enough.

Your Network Interface Name:

Like oh so many articles, this too requires an open terminal. Sure, there are GUI methods to find your network interface name, but we might as well do it in the terminal. So, use your keyboard and press CTRL + ALT + T. With your terminal open, you can start with:

With any luck, this should be enough. You’ll get something that looks like this:

network interface name
See the handy arrow? That’ll help! That’s the network interface that’s up and connected.

As you can see by the arrow, that’ll clue you into which connection is in use at the time. If that doesn’t work, you can also try this command:

The output from this will look similar to this:

lshw showing network interface names
A keen eye will note that there are multiple devices listed!

As you can see, that’s from a different device with a different operating system. It also relies on ‘lshw’ which you may or may not have access to.

You can also try:

Some of those commands will show the ‘lo’ connection, which is just a loopback connection and immaterial for this purpose. You can safely ignore that.

Anyhow, those will show you your network interface names. If you have more than one, it’ll happily show them all – and give you a clue as to which one is up. If you have both connected, say wireless and wired, then it will say both are up. This information isn’t very useful by itself, but it is useful for other purposes.

There are other ways, so feel free to leave a comment showing how you find your network interface name.

Closure:

See? I told you this one would be quick and easy. There’s not much to it, but it’s a useful bit of information to know and now you know that this is how you find your network interface name. It’s not much of an article, but it’s yet another in what’s hopefully a long list of ’em! They can’t all be huge pieces!

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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