Assign a static IP to Ubuntu (old config)
When installing a new Ubuntu system it sets up the network cards to use DHCP by default. I like to give my servers a static address. So here are the instructions detailing how to assign a static IP to Ubuntu. These instructions were written with Ubuntu 12.04 in mind, though will probably work on most other versions as well as many other Debian based distros.
First off get your self root access, click here for how to enable this if you haven’t done so already –
login as root
edit the network interface config file:
vi /etc/network/interfaces
change it from
# The primary network interface auto eth0 iface eth0 inet DHCP
to look something like this: (though edit the IPs to match your own environment)
# The primary network interface auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 network 192.168.1.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255 gateway 192.168.1.200
Save the file and then issue the following command to stop and restart your networking (you will be disconnected from your shell if you aren’t running locally):
ifdown eth0 ; ifup eth0
check your IP has changed using the following:
ifconfig eth0
You may need to edit your DNS settings once you have stopped using DHCP. One issue I faced here was that Ubuntu reset /etc/resolv.conf after each reboot which is really annoying. There are different ways of tackling this and the way that worked for me was to edit the resolvconf base file:
vi /etc/resolvconf.d/base
add your DNS servers and your local domain if you use one. Your file should look something like this:
nameserver 192.168.1.1 nameserver 192.168.1.207 nameserver 192.168.1.200 search mydomain.local
We can now restart resolveconf using this command:
/etc/init.d/resolvconf restart
Now you should be able to ping something like google.com and get a reply.
In: Linux · Tagged with: DHCP, IP, linux, Ubuntu