“ip” command is the SwissKnife for networking included in the iproute2 package. This tutorial describes how to use “ip” command for configuring IP address, MAC address, routing table, ARP table etc.

Networking commands which are part of of the iproute2 package are ip, tc, arpd, ss, bridge, devlink, rtmon, nstat, routef, routel, ctstat and lnstat. Iproute2 package contain commands for linux kernal’s advanced networking features like tunneling, traffic controlling, packet encryption along with commands for doing familiar tasks like configuration of interfaces (IP addresses, MAC addresses, MTU, Link status etc), routing table, multicast addressing, arp table etc. Though popular, most of the linux distributions are slowly trying replace these with the networking commands present in new package iproute2. These commands are part of the package net-tools which has been part of all linux distributions for a long time. You would have probably used commands like ifconfig, route, arp, hostname etc if you have done networking with linux devices. Linux networking commands are provided by two packages iproute2 and net-tools.

Checking ARP table using 'ip neighbor' command.

Linux get default route mac address