The ip command from the iproute2 package is now the Linux network management tool. Not only it combines the functionality of the old ifconfig, vconfig etc. commands, it also supports networking features that old commands never supported and still don't support, such as multiple addresses on the same interface, network namespaces, policy-based routing and so on.

One problem with the iproute2 package though is that its man pages offer only very brief descriptions of its options and don't provide any examples, so they are only good as reminders for experienced users. Many people keep using ifconfig not just out of habit, but also because they may not even know what they are missing out.

The problem was historically solved by community-maintained documentation such as http://policyrouting.org/iproute2-toc.html and https://www.lartc.org/howto/ Most of those documents have not been actively expanded since early or mid 2000's though, and do not cover any new features. They are also under non-free licenses that make them very hard to fork and maintain in case the original maintainers lose interest in maintaining them.

This document aims to provide a comprehensive, easy to use, and free an open source guide to iproute2 where network admins can quickly look up how to solve a particular problem with the ip command, for example add/remove an address, create a routing table, create a network namespace and so on.

Originally it was named "iproute2 cheatsheet", but was renamed to "Task-centered iproute2 manual" due to vastly increased size and scope.

The original and primary location of the document is https://baturin.org/docs/iproute2/

The page is bundled with all the JS and CSS it needs, so it's easy to mirror. If you decide to mirror it, please make sure to update it automatically from git to avoid creating outdated copies.

This page is preprocessed with soupault website generator to create a static ToC with section links that doesn't rely on JS.

The page wrapping is in templates/main.html and the content is in site/index.html. For ease of mirroring, a preprocessed copy is kept in build/index.html.

If you want to setup a self-updating mirror, fetch the build/index.html page.

Patches are always welcome. If you want to fix a typo, improve grammar or wording, or document a previously undocumented feature, please open a pull request or email me a patch (use git format-patch please).

The document is licensed under CC-BY-SA.