Set Up Static IP Addressing – Linux
If you are deploying equipment in a data center for the first time, you need to be aware that the IPv4 addresses for your equipment will NOT be dynamically assigned by the provider’s router. This may be a departure from what you have become accustomed to in your home or office setting, but in the data center IP address space is statically routed in the vast majority of cases. Therefor, you need to manually configure your equipment with the IP address space that has been assigned to you.
There’s a very good overview of IPv4 and IPv6 address space, and how allocations are provided to clients, elsewhere on this website – give those a read if the concepts of IP addressing are new to you.
There are many different distributions of Linux in the world today – at least 8 versions are considered popular or otherwise in wide use, and there are many more specialized versions. Unfortunately, there is no unified way that networking configuration is handled across Linux distributions, so you must seek out a guide for the specific distribution that you wish to employ. In general, configuring networking on Linux involves hand-editing of config files, followed by a restart of networking, unless you are using a config tool. To get you started, we’ve included some links for the most common distributions: