Linux Networking/Creating your network interfaces

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In many Unix operating systems the network devices have appearances in both the filesystem namespace (e.g. the /dev directory) and the network interface namespace. This is not so in Linux, where no character devices are used.

In the majority of cases, the network interface is automatically created by the device driver while it is initializing after it has located your hardware. For example, the ethernet device driver creates eth[0..n] interfaces sequentially as drivers locate your ethernet hardware. The first ethernet card found becomes eth0, the second eth1, etc.
