Linux Default Gateway Route

I only seem to run into this once a year and rarely remember what to do off the top of my head.

Problem: configuring and starting network interfaces on Linux (usually Debian / Ubuntu)

Solution: use ifup and ifdown, not ifconfig

The problem I ran into was caused by a network interface going down on a server. Bringing the network back up with ifconfig eth0 up works except for one tasty little detail: ifconfig does not set a default gateway route. And for the life of me, I couldn’t remember where I was supposed to enable this route. I looked in /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/network/if-*/*, /etc/rc.local, etc. to no avail.

I ran sudo route add default gw 192.168.0.1 eth0 to manually setup the route, but I still couldn’t figure out the best practice for enabling this route on reboot.

Finally, I looked at /etc/init.d/networking and noticed it was using ifup instead of ifconfig. Running ifup eth0 setup the correct default gateway route with no need for any manual configuration.

Useful commands:

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lspci
netstat
sudo route -n
sudo route add default gw 192.168.0.1 eth0