Essential Linux commands for Docker amd Kubernetes beginners — PART 1

Containerization has revolutionized the way we deploy and manage applications, and Linux is at the heart of this transformation. As developers, we often encounter a plethora of Linux commands that are essential to understanding and working with containers. In this series of articles, we’ll explore some of the most important Linux commands that are critical to mastering containerization and Kubernetes. In this article, we’ll start with the “ip addr” command, which is essential to understanding networking in containerized environments.

Below images shows the output for the ip addr command.

Figure 1: Network interface on linux

Before proceeding please go through my article on “network interface”.

Below I will try to elaborate the information which we can get from network interface given in Figure-1.

1. We are having 3 network interfaces installed on our system with name lo, eth0, docker0.

Let us consider only one interface among 3.

Figure 2: loopback interface

The first line shows the interface name lo, along with its current state and configuration information. Here, it shows that the interface is up and has no packet queueing discipline configured.

The second line shows the MAC address of the interface, which is a unique identifier for the network interface. Since this is the loopback interface, which doesn’t actually connect to any physical network, its MAC address is always all zeroes.

The third line inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo indicates that the IP address associated with the interface is 127.0.0.1. This IP address is reserved for the loopback interface and is used by the local machine to communicate with itself.

Finally, the last two lines show the lifetime of the address, which is set to “forever” in this case. This means that the address will not expire and will always be available for use on this network interface.

Conclusion

Through above information we can say we are having a decent idea about the network interface present in Linux. I will be sharing more article on these kind of linux commands in near future.