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Task-centered iproute2 user guide

The iproute2 package that contains ip, bridge, tc, and ss is now the Linux network management toolkit. Not only does it combine the functionality of the old ifconfig, vconfig, route, and other commands, it also supports networking features that the old tools still do not support. Some examples of missing functionality are multiple addresses on the same interface, policy-based routing, VRFs, network namespaces, and more.

A major issue with the iproute2 package is its documentation. Its man pages are extremely terse: only basic descriptions of the options and almost no examples. While for an experienced user, this level of documentation is enough, for most novice users, it is not. Many users continue using ifconfig out of habit and familiarity and ultimately miss out on the powerful features of the new tools.

Historically, community-maintained documentation such as http://policyrouting.org/iproute2-toc.html and https://www.lartc.org/howto/ filled the documentation void. Unfortunately, those classic documents were written in the early to mid-2000s and haven't been updated ever since. They are still good for learning how to use old features but don't cover any new functionality. Worse yet, those documents aren't under free-culture licenses, so it's impossible to fork them and make updated versions without their original maintainers' consent.

This document aims to provide a comprehensive, easy-to-use, free (as in freedom) guide to iproute2 — at least its ip and bridge commands (documenting tc in this style would be a separate big project).

Originally this guide was named "iproute2 cheatsheet", but it has long outgrown the scope and size of a mere cheatsheet, so now it's named a "Task-centered iproute2 user guide".

Primary location and mirroring

The original and primary location of the document is https://baturin.org/docs/iproute2/

The page is bundled with all the JS, CSS, and images, so it's easy to mirror or save for local use.

Contributing

Patches are always welcome. If you want to fix a typo, improve grammar or wording, or document a previously undocumented feature, please open a pull request or email me a patch (use git format-patch please!).

The content source is in site/index.md.

The licenses under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Contributing guidelines

Please use HTML headings with id attributes. Do not use Markdown headings. In other words, use <h3 id="ip-link-frobnicate">Frobnicate a link</h3> rather than ### Frobnicate a link.

That allows section links to stay the same even if their wording changes or they are moved around the document. People are sharing deep links to sections of this document page, so let's keep those links permanent.

Building

The manual page is built with soupault website generator/HTML processor.

This is how to build the page:

  • Install git — it's also used in the build process to generate the "last modified" timestamp.
  • Install soupault and cmark on your system.
  • Run soupault in the project directory.
  • Find the generated page in build/index.html

This is what happens during the build process:

  • site/index.md is converted to HTML and inserted in the <main> element of templates/main.html.
  • A table of contents is generated from the page headings (soupault's built-in functionality).
  • The table of contents <ul> is converted to a foldable "tree" of HTML5 <details> elements using the plugins/collapsible-list.lua plugin.
  • CSS stylesheet and images are inlined using the plugins/inline-assets.lua plugin.
  • Last modification date is extracted from the git commit history and inserted into the page, using the plugins/git-timestamp.lua plugin.