Whenever you are dealing with networks, it is very important to be well-informed of the associated terminologies such as IP addresses, Netmask, Broadcast address, etc. It is always very convenient for a network administrator to have a tool in hand that can calculate all the associated addresses with any given IP address on the go.
Ipcalc takes an IP address and netmask and provides the resulting broadcast, network, Cisco wildcard mask, and host range. You can also use it as a teaching tool to present subnetting results in an easy to understand binary values.
Here at LinuxAPT, as part of our Server Management Services, we regularly help our Customers to perform related Linux Mint Software Installation queries.
In this context, we shall look into how we can install it on a Linux Mint 20 system.
1. Perform System Update
Start by updating the system's sources list with the below command:
$ sudo apt-get update
Then, Type the following to update your system and applications:
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
2. Install ipcalc on the system
To install ipcalc on Linux Mint 20, the following command needs to be executed:
$ sudo apt-get install ipcalc
Once ipcalc is installed on your system, you can use it by applying the following syntax:
$ ipcalc [IP Address]
Here, you need to replace the IP Address with an actual IP address.
For uninstalling the ipcalc utility from your system, you need to run the below command:
$ sudo apt-get purge --autoremove ipcalc
This article covers the installation and usage of ipcalc on Linux Mint 20. In fact, With the help of this tool, you can easily find out the Netmask, wildcard, network, host ranges, broadcast address, etc. associated with any given IP address.
Main uses of ipcalc includes:
Validate IP address.
Show calculated broadcast address.
Display hostname determined via DNS.
Display network address or prefix.
How to install ipcalc in Linux ?
To install ipcalc, simply run one of the commands below, based on the Linux distribution you are using:
$ sudo apt install ipcalc
The ipcalc package should be installed automatically under CentOS/RHEL/Fedora and it is part of the initscripts package, but if for some reason it is missing, you can install it by using:
# yum install initscripts #RHEL/CentOS
# dnf install initscripts #Fedora
To find more about the ipcalc usage, you can use:
# ipcalc --help
# man ipcalc