Ubuntu 8.10 Static IP addresses

It looks like I’m not the only one to have run into difficulties with NetworkManager 0.7 in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex.

Myself I was forced to get rid of NetworkManager for two reasons:

I needed my virtual machine instances to have Real Networking (better known as Host Networking) in VirtualBox.

My ISP’s DNS servers suck. They like to point traffic to each other in an endless loop from time to time, leaving everyone without an internet connection.

To setup Host Networking I found a nice tutorial in the Community Ubuntu Documentation wiki. However, after that I noticed some strange stuff happening with my Internet connection, as all access would be lost and only a reboot would get the machine to go back online.

Then there’s the question of my ISP (Telnor) nameservers. They fail at least once a week and are slow as hell, so I wanted to configure my preferred alternates from OpenDNS. Problem was NetworkManager was having none of that, as it will rewrite /etc/resolv.conf on every single boot.

So after dealing with this nonsense for a couple of days I got rid of NetworkManager and posted my solution to launchpad.

I have a weird network setup, in which the DSL modem acts as the main DHCP server for both wired and wireless hosts. However, since alkhemy has no wireless card, I’m using my WRT54G(DD-WRT) router to act as a wireless bridge; I connect alkhemy to it via Ethernet, the router connects to the DSL modem via WiFi, so there’s no need for my computer to actively work on “keeping a connection alive at all costs” (from the NetworkManager man page) There was the question whether the virtual machines would be able to network and whether client router would be able to deal with them without barfing; I’m happy to say I haven’t encountered any issues after running everything for a week.

Hopefully someone will get around to fix these problems with NetworkManager sooner rather than later. I’m not sure if other Linux distributions are being affected by this, but if they are it’s going to get messy. It’s getting to be time Ubuntu had a release concentrating on bug-fixes rather than adding on features. But what do I know.