plotnetcfg(8)

💖 plotnetcfg — the manual, but make it cute ✨

okay bestie, so this is plotnetcfg(8) from the System Manager's Manual and it is genuinely one of my faves. let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

plotnetcfg — plot diagram of network configuration 🌸

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

plotnetcfg [options]

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

plotnetcfg is that girl. she scans the networking configuration on the machine and outputs a diagram of the configuration hierarchy. literally a glow-up for your netconfig 💅

by default, the output is in the dot language. you can convert that output with the dot(1) tool from the graphviz(7) package into all sorts of formats like PDF, PostScript or SVG. slay ✨

plotnetcfg can also scan different network name spaces and figure out the relations that span across name spaces. she supports all kinds of network interfaces and understands the specifics of VLANs, bridges, veth pairs and Open vSwitch. no cap, she knows her lore 🧚

⚠️ the tool has to be run under root or with both CAP_SYS_ADMIN and CAP_NET_ADMIN capabilities. see capabilities(7) for the details. like, she's not gonna do it without perms, bestie 😭

plotnetcfg is lightweight with as few library dependencies as possible. currently the only dependencies are libc and libjansson. optionally, it can be statically linked against the latter, which means the plotnetcfg binary can be copied over to a target machine and run right there — provided that machine has the same or a newer version of glibc than the one plotnetcfg was compiled against. portability queen 👑

see EXAMPLES for typical plotnetcfg usage.

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -f, --format=FORMAT — set the output format. when you don't specify one, dot is used. the default is the default, iykyk 💅
• -F, --list-formats — print the available output formats. window shopping fr 🛍️
• -D, --ovs-db=PATH — path to the socket used to communicate with the Open vSwitch database server. only UNIX sockets are supported, so don't try anything else 🙈 the default is /var/run/openvswitch/db.sock.
• -h, --help — print short help and exit. she's helpful AND brief ✨
• --version — print program version and exit. main character announcement 🎀

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✨ EXAMPLES ✨

display network configuration of the local machine:

plotnetcfg | dot -Tpdf | okular -

save network configuration to a file for later analysis:

plotnetcfg > file

create PDF with network configuration of a remote machine:

scp /usr/sbin/plotnetcfg root@target:
ssh root@target ./plotnetcfg | dot -Tpdf > file.pdf

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

dot(1), graphviz(7), plotnetcfg-json(5) — go read those too, they're the supporting cast 🦋

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✨ AUTHOR ✨

plotnetcfg was written and is maintained by Jiri Benc <jbenc@redhat.com>. king behavior 👑

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plotnetcfg(8) 💖 System Manager's Manual 💖 9 April 2015

and that's the whole page, bestie — go plot something pretty 🌈⭐🍓