Change Ubuntu Server From Dhcp To A Static Ip Address

Changing this setting without a GUI will require some text editing, but that’s classic linux, right?

Let’s open up the /etc/network/interfaces file. I’m going to use vi, but you can choose a different editor

For the primary interface, which is usually eth0, you will see these lines:

As you can see, it’s using DHCP right now. We are going to change dhcp to static, and then there are a number of options that should be added below it. Obviously you’d customize this to your network.

Now we’ll need to add in the DNS settings by editing the resolv.conf file:

On the line ‘name server xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx’ replace the x with the IP of your name server. (You can do ifconfig /all to find out what they are)

You need to also remove the dhcp client for this to stick (thanks to Peter for noticing). You might need to remove dhcp-client3 instead.

Now we’ll just need to restart the networking components:

Ping www.google.com. If you get a response, name resolution is working(unless of course if google is in your hosts file).

Really pretty simple.

Updated Thanks to Nickname007 in the comments for noting that I forgot the DNS entries in the guide.

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