Introduction
Iproute2 is a collection of utilities for controlling TCP [2] / IP [3] networking and traffic control in Linux. It is currently maintained by Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@osdl.org> [4]. The original author, Alexey Kuznetsov, is well known for the QoS implementation in the Linux kernel.
Most network configuration manuals still refer to ifconfig [5] and route [6] as the primary network configuration tools, but ifconfig is known to behave inadequately in modern network environments. They should be deprecated, but most distros [7] still include them. Most network configuration systems make use of ifconfig and thus provide a limited feature set. The /etc/net [8] project aims to support most modern network technologies, as it doesn't use ifconfig and allows a system administrator to make use of all iproute2 features, including traffic control.
iproute2 is usually shipped in a package called iproute or iproute2 and consists of several tools, of which the most important are ip and tc. ip controls IPv4 [9] and IPv6 [10] configuration and tc stands for traffic control. Both tools print detailed usage messages and are accompanied by a set of manpages [11].
Download
The current version is in the download [12] directory on kernel.org.
New versions will be announced on the netdev [13] mailing list.
The current iproute2 source is maintained in the GIT [14] repository. To get the current source use:
$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/shemminger/iproute2.git
You can also browse the source online via gitweb [15].
Documentation
There are many sources of documentation on the web, and it is mostly up to date.