Ubuntu Networking Configuration Using Command Line

The basics for any network based on *nix hosts is the Transport Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) combination of three protocols. This combination consists of the Internet Protocol (IP),Transport Control Protocol (TCP), and Universal Datagram Protocol (UDP).

By Default most of the users configure their network card during the installation of Ubuntu. You can however, use the ifconfig command at the shell prompt or Ubuntu’s graphical network configuration tools, such as network-admin, to edit your system’s network device information or to add or remove network devices on your system

Configure Network Interface Using Command-Line

You can configure a network interface from the command line using the networking utilities. You configure your network client hosts with the command line by using commands to change your current settings or by editing a number of system files.

Configuring DHCP address for your network card

If you want to configure DHCP address you need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces and you need to enter the following lines replace eth0 with your network interface card

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

Note :- Use vi editor if you don’t have GUI installed

If you have GUI use the following command

gksudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

# The primary network interface - use DHCP to find our address
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Configuring Static IP address for your network card

If you want to configure Static IP address you need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces and you need to enter the following lines replace eth0 with your network interface card

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

Note :- Use vi editor if you don’t have GUI installed

If you have GUI use the following command

gksudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

# The primary network interface

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.3.90
gateway 192.168.3.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.3.0
broadcast 192.168.3.255

After entering all the details you need to restart networking services using the following command

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Setting up Second IP address or Virtual IP address in Ubuntu

If you are a server system administrator or normal user some time you need to assign a second ipaddress to your Ubuntu machine.For this you need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces file and you need to add the following syntax.Below one is the only example you need to chnage according to your ip address settings

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

Note :- Use vi editor if you don’t have GUI installed

If you have GUI use the following command

gksudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
address 192.168.1.60
netmask 255.255.255.0
network x.x.x.x
broadcast x.x.x.x
gateway x.x.x.x

You need to enter all the details like address,netmask,network,broadcast and gateways values after entering all the values save this file and you need to restart networking services in debian using the following command to take effect of our new ipaddress.

After entering all the details you need to restart networking services using the following command

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Setting your ubuntu stytem hostname

Setting up your hostname upon a ubuntu installation is very straightforward. You can directly query, or set, the hostname with the hostname command.

As an user you can see your current hostname with

sudo /bin/hostname

Example

To set the hostname directly you can become root and run

sudo /bin/hostname newname

When your system boots it will automatically read the hostname from the file /etc/hostname

If you want to know more about how to setup host name check here

Setting up DNS

When it comes to DNS setup Ubuntu doesn’t differ from other distributions. You can add hostname and IP addresses to the file /etc/hosts for static lookups.

To cause your machine to consult with a particular server for name lookups you simply add their addresses to /etc/resolv.conf.

For example a machine which should perform lookups from the DNS server at IP address 192.168.3.2 would have a resolv.conf file looking like this

sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf

Note :- Use vi editor if you don’t have GUI installed

If you have GUI use the following command

gksudo gedit /etc/resolv.conf

enter the following details

search test.com
nameserver 192.168.3.2