This is the first post, in hopefully a series, detailing tools we networking and switch geeks love. We start with the underrated and oft forgotten dnsmasq and conserver.

• dnsmasq will be used to hand out BOOTP/DHCP leases to our embedded systems, as well as serve firmware images using TFTP

• conserver will be used to connect to our device’s console port so we can access the bootloader and net-boot it from dnsmasq

This is the second post in a series of posts showing how to set up networking in Linux using low-level tools.

It’s time to talk about bridging (switching) and VLANs.

Every engineer and sysadmin working with Linux have at one time or another run into networking problems. This post is the first in a series showing how to set up networking using low-level tools like: ip, bridge, tc, and ethtool.

Let’s start by exploring the basic concepts of networking.