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This document is organized top-down. The first sections include
informative material and can be skipped if you are not interested;
what follows is a generic discussion of networking issues, and you
must ensure you understand this before proceeding to more specific
parts. The rest, ``technology specific'' information is grouped in
three main sections: Ethernet and IP-related information, technologies
pertaining to widespread PC hardware and seldom-used technologies.
The suggested path through the document is thus the following:
- Read the generic sections
These sections apply to every, or
nearly every, technology described later and so are very
important for you to understand. On the other hand, I expect
many of the readers to be already confident with this material.
- Consider your network
You should know how your network is,
or will be, designed and exactly what hardware and technology
types you will be implementing.
- Read the ``Ethernet and IP'' section if you are directly connected
a LAN or the Internet
This section describes basic
Ethernet configuration and the various features that Linux offers
for IP networks, like firewalling, advanced routing and so on.
- Read the next section if you are interested in low-cost local
networks or dial-up connections
The section describes PLIP,
PPP, SLIP and ISDN, the widespread technologies used on personal
workstations.
- Read the technology specific sections related to your
requirements
If your needs differ from IP and/or common
hardware, the final section covers details specific to
non-IP protocols and peculiar communication hardware.
- Do the configuration work
You should actually try to
configure your network and take careful note of any problems
you have.
- Look for further help if needed
If you experience problems
that this document does not help you to resolve then read the
section related to where to get help or where to report bugs.
- Have fun!
Networking is fun, enjoy it.
No special convention is used here, but you must be warned about
the way commands are shown. Following the classic Unix documentation,
any command you should type to your shell is prefixed by a
prompt. This howto shows "user%" as the prompt for commands
that do not require superuser privileges, and "root#" as the
prompt for commands that need to run as root. I chose to use
"root#" instead of a plain "#" to prevent confusion
with snapshots from shell scripts, where the hash mark is used to
define comment lines.
When ``Kernel Compile Options'' are shown, they are represented in
the format used by menuconfig. They should be understandable even
if you (like me) are not used to menuconfig. If you are in doubt
about the options' nesting, running the program once can't but help.
Note that any link to other HOWTO's is local to help you browsing
your local copy of the LDP documents, in case you are using the html
version of this document. If you don't have a complete set of
documents, every HOWTO can be retrieved from metalab.unc.edu
(directory /pub/Linux/HOWTO) and its countless mirrors.
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