How to Set a Static IP in Linux

The following will work for any debian base linux distro. That includes Ubuntu, Kali, Raspberry Pi (Raspian Jessie), TAILS, and many more.

Edit Interface Settings

Edit the config:

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

Find the interface you wish to make static and add the following lines:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.100
        network 192.168.1.0
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        broadcast 192.168.1.255
        gateway 192.168.1.1

• address is the IP you want to assign this host
• network is the network portion of this subnet. It’s usually the same as your static IP but ending in .0
• netmask is the netmask of your subnet. This is usually 255.255.255.255
• broadcast is the broadcast IP of this subnet. It’s usually the same as your static IP but ending in .255
• gateway is the next hop for this system to go. This is usually a router’s IP and it must be in the same subnet as the host address.

Configure DNS

To resolve hostnames to IP addresses you must configure a DNS server. You can do this by editing the following:

vi /etc/resolv.conf

Add your DNS servers to this file or use Google’s public DNS servers like this:

nameserver 4.2.2.2
nameserver 4.2.2.3

Restart networking

To make these change effective you must restart the networking service. That can be done by doing one of the following:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

If that doesn’t work try:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking reload

If that doesn’t work try:

sudo systemctl restart ifup@eth0

Check settings

Now check if the settings took by running the following command:

ifconfig

The output looks like this:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr d8:eb:97:bd:53:4e
          inet addr:192.168.1.100  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::daeb:97ff:febd:534e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:47436 errors:0 dropped:3117 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:13017 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:5982679 (5.7 MiB)  TX bytes:1837349 (1.7 MiB)