I want to set up my machine with a static IP address. I've done it before and it worked.
It's been a long time so, once again, I researched how to do it before starting. It looked pretty familiar and I could remember the process from before ... so I got started ...
I should mention that this is a new installation. The only thing I did before attempting this was to do an update and install ssh.
The first thing that I thought was odd was the contents of /etc/network/interfaces
. It looked like this:
# interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8)
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
Where's the stuff I usually find (and the walk through pages all seemed indicate that I would find) for eth0? I was expecting to see:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
Funny thing is, it did pick up an IP address - 192.169.1.100
- which is a bit odd because IPs are usually assigned on a sequential basis and I would have expected it to pick up 192.168.1.7
because this was the next available IP.
Anyway, all this oddness aside, I ploughed on. I added the following to /etc/network/interfaces
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.201
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.1
Then the next dose of oddness ... I issued the following command: /etc/init.d/networking restart
... nothing happened. No error messages, nothing at all. So, I tried this: service networking restart
... this is what happened:
stop: Job failed while stopping
start: Job is already running: networking
So I rebooted. The network configuration looked just great. I could ssh into the machine from inside my internal network. At this moment I thought I'd done it and I could forget the odd stuff. But no, the next thing I did was run apt-get update ... it failed ... I tried to ping a couple of websites and nothing would resolve so I'm guessing it's not finding a DNS server.
But it's just a guess and it doesn't help me because I don't know what to try next.