All new material in this book has been written and arranged in such a way as to clearly separate introductory material, such as explanations of concepts and use cases, from configuration tasks. The authors hope that you can quickly find configuration instructions you need, while still providing some relevant explanations and conceptual material to help you understand and decide on the appropriate tasks relevant to your needs. Where material has been reused from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Deployment Guide, it has been reviewed and changed, where possible, to fit this idea of separating concepts from tasks.

The material is grouped according to the goal rather than the method. Instructions on how to achieve a specific task using different methods are grouped together. This is intended to make it easier for you to find the information on how to achieve a particular task or goal, and at the same time allow you to quickly see the different methods available.

In each chapter, the configuration methods will be presented in the following order: A graphical user interface (GUI) method, such as the use of nm-connection-editor or control-network to direct NetworkManager, then NetworkManager's command-line tool nmcli, and then finally methods using the command line and configuration files. The command line can be used to issue commands and to compose or edit configuration files, therefore the use of the ip commands and configuration files will be documented together.