Ubuntu Networking Configuration 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(Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol ) 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

# 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

# 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 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

enter the following details

search test.com
nameserver 192.168.3.2