OUTDATET: All posted commands on this page are not longer valid, because the network stack is under heavy development and will be updated. The network concept and general structure is still valid and will be adapted after we have a working network stack again.

IPFire 3.x has a completely new way of configuring networks. This new set of instructions is able to configure as many networks as you like. Therefore the commands to configure this complex part of the IPFire-distribution is a little more complicated as you might know it from simple ifconfig commands.

1. Define Zones

A Zone is a network part like "green", "orange" or "blue". But here the zones are not limited and there is no
dependence on a NIC (which are "ports"). The "ports" are later assigned to a zone.
You can have as many zones as you like.
For this simple startup, we want to have a Internet-zone, called "upl0" and a local network zone called "net0":

network zone new upl0 bridge

network zone new net0 bridge

As you can see, we define two zones here which are acting as a bridge. Now we need to tell IPFire-3.x what IP-Addresses should be assigned to each zone.

2. Assign IP-Adresses

Now we need to give the zones a specific IP-Address. For better illustration, we will assign a DHCP-Address to upl0 which will be our "red" Interface and a static IP-Address for net0 which will be our "green":

network zone upl0 config new ipv4-dhcp

network zone net0 config new ipv4-static --address=192.168.11.20 --prefix=24

3. Assign Ports to the zones

Finally we need to assign the "real" networkcards to the zones. In this testsystem, we configured 2 NICs in the vm. One should be used for upl0 and the other for net0:

network zone upl0 port attach p0

network zone net0 port attach p1

Now we are nearly ready to use our network. Just configure a DNS-Namerserver and restart the network

4. Configure DNS

The command for configuring the DNs is a simple:

network dns-server add 8.8.8.8 (Here 8.8.8.8 is the google nameserver)

Now restart the whole network:

network restart

You should now be able to ping the server and reach the Internet.


Useful Commands / Troubleshooting

Always read the manpages. Some useful commands are found below:

  1. List available Network devices
    network device list

  2. Show network status
    network status

  3. View Logfile (view all entries since last boot)
    journalctl -ab