Re: Odd spurious IP addr in ifconfig

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

David E. Fox wrote:
> Earlier, I was looking at old threads in my mail archive and found a
> neat way to get the IP address from a shell script, but in trying it I
> noticed - hey that's *not* my IP address! I've had static IP here on a
> DSL line since December 2000, and my IP address has always been the
> same. I don't yet fool around with IP masquerading, which is possibly
> what it could be. 
>
> Here's what 'ifconfig eth0' reports currently:
>
> dfox@m206-157:~$ /sbin/ifconfig eth0
> eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:00:94:B7:53:84
>           inet addr:169.254.162.234  Bcast:0.0.0.0  Mask:255.255.0.0
>
> And mine is (and has been for 5 years):
>
> auto eth0
> iface eth0 inet static
>         address 198.144.206.157
>         netmask 255.255.255.0

[...]

> So, I'm thinking, maybe it's a dynamic IP address, but I have no use
> for that here.

This kind of problem is usually due to a nasty little package called
"zeroconf". It often gets installed inadvertently and then it messes
with your network configuration. Uninstalling + purging it, followed by
ifdown/ifup eth0 is normally enough to restore the old behavior.

Regards,
           Florian