[SLUG] Networking

[Al Girling]

On Sun, 11 May 2003 19:06:46 +0100
Paul  Teasdale wrote:

> You may not need this if you get Debian up and running but for anyone
> interested the file you are talking about is in
> \etc\sysconfig\scripts\networking and is called ifcfg-eth0. The line to
> change is BOOTPROTO and you need to change it from DHCP (not dcop) to
> STATIC. The reason for this is that Phil's PC was using DHCP to get an IP
> address automatically from a DHCP server and our small network of two
> machines didn't have one. We therefore needed to change Phil's machine to
> use a static IP address hence specifying the variable 'STATIC'.

Cheers Paul,

I received a reply from Phil after sending my message to the list yesterday.  In his mail he says the file ifcfg-eth0 is in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/  But this files doesn't exist.  In fact your /etc/sysconfig/scripts/ doesn't exist on my machine.  I did have limited success by creating the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 which contained:

DEVICE="eth0"
BOOTPROTO="static"
IPADDR="192.168.0.1"
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
NETWORK=192.168.0.0
BROADCAST=192.168.0.255
ONBOOT="yes"

After rebooting I found the ethernet card had been auto detected and was already UP.  I was unable to ping the second machine however.  From your mail I guess all the variable names should be upper case.  Although what you see as my example is a copy of Phil's file with the 'IPADDR' line altered to suit my system.

> Finally you will also need to make sure that the same file contains the
> static IP address (and a subnet mask) that you wish to allocate.

So should this file contain a line like:

SUBNETMASK="*" 

Details of what the subnetmask should be would be nice. :)

> BTW after changing the BOOTPROTO variable you will need to (from the same
> directory) take down and bring up the interface to get the changes. Do this
> with:
>
> ./ifdown eth0
> ./ifup eth0

I've tried using

# ifup eth0

 on several occasions but I only ever see a response from bash like:

Usage: ifup <device name>

As 'ifup' has no manpage or infopage and 'help ifup' has no content I'm rapidly losing patience with Mdk 9.0.

Running Linux has nothing to say.  Call me wierd but I'd have thought networking two machines with a crossover cable would be most peoples first experience networking, yet it says nothing!

Not a happy bunny!

Al