25 Linux Network Management Commands Every Sysadmin Should Know
In this article, use 25 essential Linux networking commands like ip, ss, dig, tcpdump, and ufw to diagnose connectivity issues, trace paths, and open ports in the firewall.
Typing ifconfig or netstat on a new server often returns a "command not found" error because those legacy tools are no longer installed by default.
Here are 25 current commands, including ip, nmcli, ss, tcpdump, and nft, for managing Linux networks.
A large part of a sysadmin's day is dedicated to network operations, such as assigning a server a new address, diagnosing why a service is unreachable, or opening a port in a firewall.
Many of the traditional commands used for these tasks, like ifconfig, route, and netstat, originate from the legacy net-tools package, which hasn't been actively developed for years and is no longer part of a default Rocky Linux, RHEL, or Ubuntu Server install.
Their replacements come from the iproute2 suite (ip and ss), which talks to the kernel through its netlink interface and shows details net-tools misses, such as secondary addresses added without interface aliases.
Firewalls have changed in the same way, since nftables has replaced iptables as the kernel's packet filtering framework.