HOWTO Configure a Static IP Address on Linux

Introduction

This document explains how to configure a static IP address on the Ethernet interface of a Linux host.

With recent versions of Linux distributions, the network configuration is performed with NetworkManager.

Ubuntu configures networking through a higher abstraction tool called Netplan which internally invokes NetworkManager as a renderer.

Reference documents

• https://www.baeldung.com/linux/set-static-ip-address

• Netplan documentation

• NetworkManager - Debian WIki

• Ubuntu Forum: Need advice: Redoing networking on an old server?

Configuring Netplan

From https://netplan.io:

Netplan is a utility for easily configuring networking on a linux system. You simply create a YAML description of the required network interfaces and what each should be configured to do. From this description Netplan will generate all the necessary configuration for your chosen renderer tool.

TODO

Configuring NetworkManager

NOTE: Even though NetworkManager was designed for the Gnome desktop environment, it works “just-fine” also in server editions of those OSs. Checked on the following

Vendor	OS Name	network-manager	version
Canonical	Ubuntu 22.04	network-manager	1.36.6-0ubuntu2
Raspberry Pi	Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)	dhcpd5	1:8.1.2-1+rpt1
Raspberry Pi	Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)	network-manager	1.30.6-1+deb11u1
Raspberry Pi	Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)	network-manager	1.42.4-1+rpt1

Logged in to the host which will act as raspinstall01 execute the following commands:

sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.ORIG
sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces/eth0-static

and write the following contents to the config file:

# file:/etc/network/interfaces.d/eth0-static

# Configure static IP address for eth0
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
    address 172.20.0.1
    netmask 255.255.0.0

# EOF

Reboot raspinstall01 to allow the changes to take effect.

Login again and verify that eth0 was assigned the desired IP address:

gmacario@raspinstall01:~ $ ip address show eth0
2: eth0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether e4:5f:01:dd:4c:0e brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 172.20.0.1/24 brd 172.20.0.255 scope global eth0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
gmacario@raspinstall01:~ $