Debian Static IP

Debian Static IP. If you need to change your IP from Dynamic (DHCP) to static, I have presented a method here for doing it. There are other alternatives as well. You can reserve the IP in the router to a specific mac address.

In Debian (and Ubuntu, just remember sudo) the network card is stored here:
/etc/network/interfaces
Its up to you if you want to back it up before you go on and edit it.
Anyway, launch vim or something else you fancy.
vim /etc/network/interfaces

And it will probably look something like this:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth0

That is how it looks when using a dhcp server instead of static ip. If we decide to use the ip 10.0.0.10 instead of a dynamic ip. And we want it to be able to talk to the internet, and the gateway is at 10.0.0.1. We replace the primary part with this:

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.0.0.10
gateway 10.0.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 10.0.0.0 # Not required
broadcast 10.0.0.255 # Not required

Then we need to restart the network card interface to activate the static ip.
/etc/init.d/networking restart

Happy communicating!