Gentoo Linux AMD64 Handbook

Chapter 3. Configuring your Network
Automatic Network Detection
Maybe it just works
If your system is plugged into an Ethernet network with a DHCP server, it is very likely that your
networking configuration has already been set up automatically for you. If so, you should be able to
take advantage of the many included network-aware commands on the Installation CD such as ssh,
scp, ping, irssi, wget and links, among others.
If networking has been configured for you, the ifconfig command should list some network interfaces
besides lo, such as eth0:
Example 3.1. ifconfig for a working network configuration
# ifconfig
(...)
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:BA:8F:61:7A
inet addr:192.168.0.2 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::50:ba8f:617a/10 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1498792 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1284980 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:1984 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:485691215 (463.1 Mb) TX bytes:123951388 (118.2 Mb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0xe800
Optional: Configure any Proxies
If you access the Internet through a proxy, you might need to set up proxy information during the
installation. It is very easy to define a proxy: you just need to define a variable which contains the
proxy server information.
In most cases, you can just define the variables using the server hostname. As an example, we assume
the proxy is called proxy.gentoo.org and the port is 8080.
Example 3.2. Defining proxy servers
(If the proxy filters HTTP traffic)
# export http_proxy="http://proxy.gentoo.org:8080"
(If the proxy filters FTP traffic)
# export ftp_proxy="ftp://proxy.gentoo.org:8080"
(If the proxy filters RSYNC traffic)
# export RSYNC_PROXY="proxy.gentoo.org:8080"
If your proxy requires a username and password, you should use the following syntax for the variable:
Example 3.3. Adding username/password to the proxy variable
http://username:password@proxy.gentoo.org:8080
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