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I still remember when I first opened a Linux system and saw the complex networking world before me. As a penetration tester, mastering networking in Linux became one of the most crucial steps in my learning journey. In this part of the series, I’ll take you through each networking concept and command I’ve learned, from IP addresses and netmasks to advanced scanning and tunnelling tools.

Along the way, I’ll use analogies, tips, and code examples to make the journey engaging and practical. Let’s dive in!

Think of an IP address like a street address for your computer on a network. For example, it 192.168.1.5 might be the address of your machine on a home LAN.

The subnet mask (or prefix) is like a way of dividing the city into “neighbourhoods”: it tells you which portion of the IP is the network and which portion is the individual host.

We usually write IPs in CIDR slash notation, e.g. 192.168.1.5/24 means a 24-bit netmask (255.255.255.0). In slash notation, you count the number of 1 bits in the mask (here 24) and append that to the IP.