Assigning an IP address manually

[Tim Chase]

In addition to Geoff Shang's correct answer, it may also be
possible to get your DHCP server to give you a fixed address
based on your MAC hardware address.  How to do this depends on
who's handing out DHCP addresses.  Sometimes this is your router,
sometimes this is your ISP, sometimes it's another machine on
your network.  If you control your DHCP (either via your router
or via another machine on your network), you can force it to give
a particular IP address to your machine's MAC every time.

Unless I'm setting up a multi-homed machine (where one machine
has two IP addresses on the same hardware interface), I prefer to
have the DHCP server do the work for me so all my DHCP
administration is in one place rather than tweaking each machine
individually.  As far as I've been able to tell, DHCP doesn't
have a graceful way of allocating multiple IP addresses for the
same machine, so I've had to do that the way Geoff describes, by
hand-editing the interfaces file.

-tim