The NIC must be configured at boot time with many networking parameters, such as an IP address and mask. In addition your host will need a default gateway address to configure its routing table. To use DNS your computer must be assigned a hostname, a default domain name, and must be configured with the IP address of at least one DNS server to use to translate names to IP addresses.
The easiest way to configure TCP/IP networking is to let someone else do it. One way to achieve this is to configure your system to use DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) for each NIC. When the system brings up the NIC (usually at boot time) it will send a broadcast DHCP request packet. If there is a DHCP server listening on that LAN, it will respond with (hopefully) all the required networking parameters.
The other way to configure networking parameters is manually editing various configuration files (or using some tool to edit those files). This is called static addressing.
For wireless laptops Fedora Linux systems come with a newer networking
system called NetworkManager.
This software is poorly documented and doesn't work well for static,
wired networking.
You should use chkconfig and service to turn
this daemon off and make sure it stays off, and then use these tools
to turn on the older network service.
When using the network service, the configuration is controlled by
the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.
To configure the system for DHCP this file should look
something like this:
# Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] DEVICE=eth0 HWADDR= =00:06:5B:3E:89:0F ONBOOT=yes BOOTPROTO=dhcp
This will cause the network system to configure everything using DHCP. For a static setup, this file should look like this:
# Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] DEVICE=eth0 HWADDR= =00:06:5B:3E:89:0F ONBOOT=yes BOOTPROTO=static IPADDR=192.168.0.7 NETMASK=255.255.255.0 GATEWAY=192.168.0.4
That will configure the IP address and mask,
and the default route, but not DNS.
To configure the DNS system when not using DHCP,
you must also edit the file /etc/resolv.conf, which
should look something like the following:
search hccfl.edu nameserver 169.139.222.4 nameserver 169.139.222.15
Finally you may need to set the hostname.
The default of
is fine
for most purposes.
If you do need to set a different hostname, use the
localhost.localdomainhostname command.
(There is no file to edit on a modern Linux system to set this.
However, you should add an entry to /etc/hosts with your
static IP address and hostname.)