What is an Ethernet network device?

A computer network (or more simply, a network) is a telecommunications equipment that allows computers to exchange data with each other. In a computer network, several computers exchange data with each other using a data link, which can be made of cable media or wireless media. More specifically, the Ethernet network is a family of wired computer-networking technologies commonly used in Local Area Network (LAN) where every device communicating over it divides a stream of data into shorter pieces called frames that contain a lot of information useful for data communication as the source and destination addresses, error-checking data, and so on. Then, obviously, there is also the data link layer (as per the OSI model) where the information are stored.

In a GNU/Linux system, an Ethernet device is a computer peripheral that is used to get access to an Ethernet network and then to exchange data with other Ethernet-equipped computers. In a GNU/Linux system, these...