Linux Administration Cookbook

How it works...

All we've done here is created an interface script that your system can use to correctly configure an interface at boot time.

Let's go through the options we added to our file.

BOOTPROTO=none

This setting stands for boot-time protocol and we've set it to none instead of dhcp or bootp.

In a DHCP environment, you want an address to be assigned automatically by your DHCP server. Here, we're setting a static address, so we state the following.

ONBOOT=yes

This one might seem obvious, but the default behaviour of an interface is to not initialize at boot. With this setting, we ensure that the network interface is brought up with the system.

IPADDR=192.168.44.10NETMASK=255.255.255.0

Somewhat self-explanatory, but these options are ...