Configuring a Static IP Address in Ubuntu 8.10

November 27, 2008 in Uncategorized
Tags: linux, ubuntu

i recently wanted to give my lap a static ip for some n/w administration purposes. i am running ubuntu 8.10 on it. the network manager was the usual way to go about when getting this done so i tried setting a static ip from the network manager. but it doesn’t work as expected. my configuration gets replaced my the default auto detected one when i restart the machine. when i googled it, i found out that its a know bug(its a very simple thing IMHO it should have been detected and fixed!).

so i followed what appeared to be a good blog post on fixing this issue. it was very straight forward and i followed the given instructions in that post. but it was not working for me. basically i couldn’t even ping my gateway. so i restarted the lap. then i could ping my gateway. and everything seems to be ok. but the dns was not working as expected. in my /etc/reslov.conf file i have specified two nameserver. my localhost and my router(which runs a dns server). but when i try to lookup a dns address the system seems to be only seeing my localhost as the available dns server. btw because of my GRATE ISP, and the SUPER FAST dns server which have a 100% UPTIME! i am using dnsmasq for caching(so that would speed up my internet browsing). dnsmasq it self supports some DHCP capabilities. so i don’t know whether they are messing things up for my system. anyways, all i had to do to get things up and going was to change the /etc/dnsmasq.conf file and add the line

server=192.168.1.1

192.168.1.1 is my dns server’s(dns server running in my router) address. now when ever dnsmasq gets a dns request he will look in his cache and if its not there he will ask my dns server running in the router(he will ask from my isp’s … so on…).

this sloved my problem. atleast for now. i don’t know what really caused the first behavior i noticed. but i am too lazy to find about that. so this should fix it for now.