The net tools
These tools are stored in the net-tools package, and they are a set of utility programs we can use to easily manipulate Ethernet devices. Inside this package, there are several programs, and few of them are specifically for Ethernet devices.
One of the most important Ethernet-related networking tool is ifconfig, which is used to configure a network interface. We already used it several times in this book to discover the available network interfaces on our system or just to set up our IP address.
Even if the ifconfig command can solve quite all the network settings, it's now deprecated, and a more powerful tool exists to replace it: the ip command (which is in the iproute2 package). This command can be used for every task we can do with ifconfig and much more! Just as a simple example, here is a command to show the list of active network addresses in the SAMA5D3 Xplained using the ip command:
root@a5d3:~# ip address list 1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue...
