# route add vlite gw vlager
Dynamic routing offers a much better option for temporary routes. You could use gated, a routing daemon, which you would have to install on each host in the network in order to distribute routing information dynamically. The easiest option, however, is to use proxy ARP (Address Resolution Protocol). With proxy ARP, vlager will respond to any ARP query for vlite by sending its own Ethernet address. All packets for vlite will wind up at vlager, which then forwards them to the laptop. We will come back to proxy ARP in the section "Checking the ARP Tables".
Current net-tools releases contain a tool called plipconfig, which allows you to set certain PLIP timing parameters. The IRQ to be used for the printer port can be set using the ifconfig command.
The SLIP and PPP Interfaces
Although SLIP and PPP links are only simple point-to-point links like PLIP connections, there is much more to be said about them. Usually, establishing a SLIP connection involves dialing up a remote site through your modem and setting the serial line to SLIP mode. PPP is used in a similar fashion. We discuss SLIP and PPP in detail in Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, The Point-to-Point Protocol.
The Dummy Interface
The dummy interface is a little exotic, but rather useful nevertheless. Its main benefit is with standalone hosts and machines whose only IP network connection is a dialup link. In fact, the latter are standalone hosts most of the time, too.
The dilemma with standalone hosts is that they only have a single network device active, the loopback device, which is usually assigned the address 127.0.0.1. On some occasions, however, you must send data to the "official" IP address of the local host. For instance, consider the laptop vlite, which was disconnected from a network for the duration of this example. An application on vlite may now want to send data to another application on the same host. Looking up vlite in /etc/hosts yields an IP address of 172.16.1.65, so the application tries to send to this address. As the loopback interface is currently the only active interface on the machine, the kernel has no idea that 172.16.1.65 actually refers to itself! Consequently, the kernel discards the datagram and returns an error to the application.
This is where the dummy device steps in. It solves the dilemma by simply serving as the alter ego of the loopback interface. In the case of vlite, you simply give it the address 172.16.1.65 and add a host route pointing to it. Every datagram for 172.16.1.65 is then delivered locally. The proper invocation is:[35]
# ifconfig dummy vlite
# route add vlite
IP Alias
New kernels support a feature that can completely replace the dummy interface and serve other useful functions. IP Alias allows you to configure multiple IP addresses onto a physical device. In the simplest case, you could replicate the function of the dummy interface by configuring the host address as an alias onto the loopback interface and completely avoid using the dummy interface. In more complex uses, you could configure your host to look like many different hosts, each with its own IP address. This configuration is sometimes called "Virtual Hosting," although technically it is also used for a variety of other techniques.[36]
To configure an alias for an interface, you must first ensure that your kernel has been compiled with support for IP Alias (check that you have a /proc/net/ip_alias file; if not, you will have to recompile your kernel). Configuration of an IP alias is virtually identical to configuring a real network device; you use a special name to indicate it's an alias that you want. For example:
# ifconfig lo:0 172.16.1.1
This command would produce an alias for the loopback interface with the address 172.16.1.1. IP aliases are referred to by appending:n to the actual network device, in which "n" is an integer. In our example, the network device we are creating the alias on is lo, and we are creating an alias numbered zero for it. This way, a single physical device may support a number of aliases.
Each alias may be treated as though it is a separate device, and as far as the kernel IP software is concerned, it will be; however, it will be sharing its hardware with another interface.
All About ifconfig
There are many more parameters to ifconfig than we have described so far. Its normal invocation is this:
ifconfig interface [address [parameters]]
interface is the interface name, and address is the IP address to be assigned to the interface. This may be either an IP address in dotted quad notation or a name that ifconfig will look up in /etc/hosts.
If ifconfig is invoked with only the interface name, it displays that interface's configuration. When invoked without any parameters, it displays all interfaces you have configured so far; a -a option forces it to show the inactive ones as well. A sample invocation for the Ethernet interface eth0 may look like this:
# ifconfig eth0
eth0 Link encap 10Mbps Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:C0:90:B3:42
inet addr 172.16.1.2 Bcast 172.16.1.255 Mask 255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MTU 1500 Metric 0
RX packets 3136 errors 217 dropped 7 overrun 26
TX packets 1752 errors 25 dropped 0 overrun 0
The MTU and Metric fields show the current MTU and metric value for that interface. The metric value is traditionally used by some operating systems to compute the cost of a route. Linux doesn't use this value yet, but defines it for compatibility, nevertheless.
The RX and TX lines show how many packets have been received or transmitted error free, how many errors occurred, how many packets were dropped (probably because of low memory), and how many were lost because of an overrun. Receiver overruns usually occur when packets come in faster than the kernel can service the last interrupt. The flag values printed by ifconfig roughly correspond to the names of its command-line options; they will be explained later.
The following is a list of parameters recognized by ifconfig with the corresponding flag names. Options that simply turn on a feature also allow it to be turned off again by preceding the option name by a dash (-).
up
This option makes an interface accessible to the IP layer. This option is implied when an address is given on the command line. It may also be used to reenable an interface that has been taken down temporarily using the down option.
This option corresponds to the flags UP and RUNNING.
down
This option marks an interface inaccessible to the IP layer. This effectively disables any IP traffic through the interface. Note that this option will also automatically delete all routing entries that use this interface.
35
The dummy device is called dummy0 if you have loaded it as a module rather than choosing it as an inbuilt kernel option. This is because you are able to load multiple modules and have more than one dummy device.
36
More correctly, using IP aliasing is known as network layer virtual hosting. It is more common in the WWW and STMP worlds to use application layer virtual hosting, in which the same IP address is used for each virtual host, but a different hostname is passed with each application layer request. Services like FTP are not capable of operating in this way, and they demand network layer virtual hosting.