Frequently Asked Questions

Debian's networking configuration is done in the following files:

/etc/network/interfaces (see http://www.digipedia.pl/man/interfaces.5.html for further details)

/etc/resolv.conf (see http://linux.die.net/man/5/resolv.conf for further details)

For dynamic IP address assignment ( DHCP ) only the  /etc/network/interfaces must be changed. So configuration for eth0 looks like this:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

For static IP address assignment both files must be changed, especially if DNS functionality is needed. Assuming your router has IP address 192.168.254.1 the configuration for eth0 in /etc/network/interfaces looks like this:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.254.254
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.254.1

/etc/resolv.conf gets following entry:

nameserver 192.168.254.1