Routing Tables & Gateways
Learn how to inspect and manipulate Linux routing tables to control how network traffic is forwarded to its destination.
What are Routing Tables?
Imagine your computer needs to send data to another device on a different network. How does it know which path to take?
That's where the routing table comes in! It's like a map for your operating system, containing rules that tell it where to forward network traffic.
- Each rule specifies a destination network or host.
- It also points to the 'next hop' or interface to use.
Inspecting Your Routing Table
In Linux, the primary command to view the routing table is ip route show (or just ip route). Let's see what it looks like:
ip route show