In this video, I'll tell you more about network address card naming.
To create a configuration, IP address configuration needs to be connected to a specific network
device.
And you can use IP link show to see current devices, and IP address show to check their
configuration.
Every system has an LO device, which is used for internal network.
And apart from that, you'll see the name of the real network device, which is presented
as a BIOS name.
Now what does that mean?
Well, to understand BIOS names, you should understand how it works before.
In older versions of Linux, you would use device names like eth0 and eth1 and so on.
These device names potentially are problematic because they don't reveal any information
about physical device location.
BIOS naming is based on hardware properties to give more specific information in the device
name.
And that allows you as an administrator to physically identify the device in an easier
way.
And there are different options.
Some of the most common are using EM for embedded network cards, or ENO as an alternative notation
for embedded network cards, or P followed by a slot number and P followed by a port
number for network cards on the PCI bus.
All of this depends on the information that is revealed by the driver of the network card.
And if the driver doesn't reveal networking device properties, the classical naming will
be used instead.
Let me show you.
So I'm using IP link show.
And in IP link show, we can see this LO for loopback and ENS160.
So EN is for embedded, and you can see that it even has alternative names.
So the alternative name is ENP2S0.
That's for PCI bus 2 slot 0.
And that allows you to easily find the device that is being used.
Later on, I will tell you about the LSPCI command.
The LSPCI command is showing information about PCI bus 2 slot 0.
And look at that.
That's an ethernet controller, internet whatever.
And if you would use LSPCI minus K, you can even see which driver is used.
So that's the E1000 driver.
I'll tell you much more about drivers later in this course.
Let's not do that now.
Let's focus on configuration a bit more.