Q. I’ve recently installed Debian Linux 4.0 on my server and Ubuntu Linux 7.04 on Laptop. I would love to have a multiple IP address that I can use for verity of purposes. I would like to bind 4 IP's to the 'eth0' device or NIC. How do I do that?
A.. Let us assume that your eth0 IP address is 192.168.1.1. You need to create alias or binding using eth0:0, eth0:1...eth0:N devices. You need to add range of IP's in /etc/network/interfaces config file under Debian/Ubuntu Linux. First make a backup of existing file:
# cp /etc/network/interfaces /root/working.interfaces
Now open file using vi text editor:
#vi /etc/network/interfaces
OR
$ sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces
Modify as follows:
auto eth0 auto eth0:0 auto eth0:1 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.248 gateway 192.168.1.254 iface eth0:0 inet static address 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.248 gateway 192.168.1.254 iface eth0:1 inet static address 192.168.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.248 gateway 192.168.1.254 # add rest of alias / binds below
Save and close the file.
Now restart networking, enter:
# /etc/init.d/networking restart
OR
$ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
Updated for accuracy.
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Did you possibly make a type for the 192.168.1.3 assignment?
shows:
iface eth0:0 inet static
address 192.168.1.3
netmask 255.255.255.248
gateway 192.168.1.254
should be (?):
iface eth0:1 inet static
address 192.168.1.3
netmask 255.255.255.248
gateway 192.168.1.254
Yes, he meant to type iface eth0:1 instead of iface eth0:0 :) He typo’d
Hi,
Thank you a lot for this very nice howto.
It was very helpful
:)
This posting title is a bit misleading, it doesn’t tell you how to setup a range, it tells you how to setup multiple ip addresses individually.
Is there any way to say bind all ip’s in a 192.168.1.0/24 range, starting with eth0:0 or some such? Something without having to have 4 lines per ip address.
In RedHat its a special file called ifcfg-eth0-range0 and has some special parameters but allows you to bind hundreds of ip addresses with just a few lines
Clint,
title is correct and this is the only way to add ranges. Redhat/centos has special file for this purpose. However, you can write a shell script to add IP in ranges. Try something as follows from /etc/rc.local:
for ip in {1..254}; do echo ifconfig eth0:${ip} 192.168.1.$ip netmask 255.255.255.248 up; doneHTH
Actually, what you have described is how to create a virtual interface on a NIC. A side effect of doing this is an IP alias is also automatically created. These are not the same things.
As an aside, I have several servers with several aliased IP addresses on the NICs. There are NO virtual interfaces (e.g. eth0.2, eth1:3, etc).
Hey Vivek,
I have a related question. Do you know what is the maximum limit of IP addresses a single NIC can have in linux?
Not sure, but I just tried to add 5000 ipv6 ips to one interface, but got out of memory message after 4091 IPs
Umm… yeah, so why is the netmask 255.255.255.248 when the client IPs are .1-3 and the gateway is at .254? Would you not need a netmask of 255.255.255.0 to keep the client IP’s and gateway in the same subnet??
it seems that we can bind these ip to loopback, such as lo:1 lo:2 ?