Linux Network Troubleshoot Commands – Top 9 Tools [Guide]

As a network administrator, routine responsibilities like monitoring, configurations, management, and troubleshooting don’t require learning any complicated third-party tools. Instead of using any third-party tool, you can perform all these tasks with readily available tools, Which means the tools that are already installed with most of the Linux Distributions.

So, in this article, we will focus on the different types of network troubleshooting parts in network administration. I will also cover all the tools and the commands to resolve these issues under the other categories. 

---

Read – Ubuntu: 5 Reasons It’s the Ideal Linux Distro for Developers

---

9 Best Linux Network Troubleshoot Commands for Efficient Networking

• ifconfig

On Linux OS

Ifconfig is a command-line utility that is known for interface configurations only in Linux or any Unix Operating system, as the ifconfig command is used in the Network administrations to query and manage its interface parameters with the help of these Configurations scripts.

So you can activate or deactivate interfaces with up/down parameters. 

sudo ifconfig up eth0

sudo ifconfig down eth0

To assign IP addresses:

sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.120.5 netmask 255.255.255.0

However, if the utility is not ready or available in the Linux distributions, you can get the error “ifconfig: command not found” on the screen.

On Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install net-tools

yum install net-tools

---

Read – iPhone: 5 Exclusive Features iPhone Excels At Over Any Android

---

• IP Address

To display all the interfaces and the computer details:

ip addr show

To add or remove interfaces, type

ip an add 192.168.120.174 dev eth0

ip a del 192.168.120.174 dev eth0

After that, it enables or disables the ARP protocols for the interfaces; the only thing you can do is use the On/OFF options:

ip link set dev eth0 arp on

ip link set dev eth0 arp off

---

Read – iPhone 13 Mini: Top 3 Features I Loved

---

• Ping

The ping utility will help you identify the network and host availability. So, check that the host is reachable or if a service is running. You can check network connectivity issues like high latency or certain package drops using the ping command.

Ping sends the ICMP, which means Internet Control Message protocols echo request messages and wait for the ICMP Echo to reply packets; these reply packets check the host availability.

ping 8.8.8.8

• netstat

It is a command utility that helps discover connections and listen to UDP, TCP, and UNIX sockets. Netstat displays the information about the routing table, information statistics, and routing tables.

netstat -a

To get a list of any listening TCP connections:

netstat -tl

It lists the PID of the processes and program names.

netstat -ptl 

• host

The host is a minimal yet powerful CLI utility tool.

To find NX for the Google website:

host -t ns google.com

You can find MX records by running cmd

host -n -t mx google.com

• arp

The ARP is the command that helps you manipulate the cache of the system’s ARP table by adding or deleting addresses. It can also perform tasks that belong to the tools that are available inside the net-tool packages. 

arp <ip_address>

• traceroute

Once you get the ping utility, it provides information about the network connectivity and overall the time when the packets drop and reach the final destinations. So you can use the traceroute command to figure out all the details in depth and the path that the packet is taking to their destinations. With these entails you can resolve these issues.

For these instances, the following command output hopes the destinations host 8.8.8.8 (Google) from your local machine

traceroute 8.8.8.8

• dig

A dig is used for Domain Information Groper, which gathers DNS-related information and solves DNS Problems.

So, these DNS commands help you get the output and display the information available inside files containing DNS records. They also allow the network administrators to verify the host and the IP address name resolutions, which will work fine. 

dig google.com

• Wireshark

Wireshark captures the traffic from your selected interface card in real time. It also allows network administrators to capture the traffic based on protocol/port to monitor their troubleshooting issues.

Wrapping Up

Network troubleshooting in Linus is part of day-to-day life. As I hope that this command will help youtube solve your issues. If you still have queries related to these commands or this post, please ask me in the comments.