Introduction

Networking is the act of interconnecting machines to form a network so that the machines can interchange information. The most widely used networking stack is TCP/IP, where each node is assigned a unique IP address for identification. There are many parameters in networking, such as subnet mask, route, ports, host names, and so on which require a basic understanding to follow.

Several applications that make use of a network operate by opening and connecting to something called ports, which denote services such as data transfer, remote shell login, and so on. Several interesting management tasks can be performed on a network consisting of many machines. Shell scripts can be used to configure the nodes in a network, test the availability of machines, automate execution of commands at remote hosts, and so on. This chapter focuses on different recipes that introduce interesting tools or commands related to networking, and also how they can be used for solving different problems.