I have set up a minimal (by packages) Debian machine. I want to run the command "ip", as in:

#ip link show

My research shows that this command is all about IPv4. (I am wanting to follow the FireHOL documentation). I have tried everywhere to work out which package this command might be in. One of the first things I did was to install the iptables package, but I still only get this response from whereis:

# whereis ip
ip: /usr/share/man/man7/ip.7.gz

Thus my simple question is - how do I find out the name of a package given the name of a command? I have done searches based on description from packages.debian.org, and come up with a URL for the package libnetwork-ipv4addr-perl, but I don't think I got to the right place.

Often dselect turns something up for me, but this didn't help either.

Also if anyone knows the name of the package that would be great!

thanks - Chris Murphy

Thanks!

I used the (Debian) dselect tool to install iproute. iproute2 not available from the CD set, but I could
easily get it. Anyway for better or worse I installed the iproute package. Now the command ip works,
but I get a strange result:

# ip link show
Cannot send dump request: Connection refused

I've done a quick --help, but I don't want to get into the hole of finding out too much information, so
thought I'd come back here and ask the pretty obvious question - anyway I'll get hold of iproute2
and come back if any problems. Maybe my kernel will be too old for it. Are there packages on debian for
upgrading your kernel? I assume there are.

About two hops away from the main debian page you get to here:

http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_contents

I just entered 'ip' and pressed search and hey presto - got the answer.