setting up a static IP address

[Steve Kleene <skdeb@syrano.acb.uc.edu>]

I asked my organization to assign me a static IP address within their
network, and they obliged.  The problem is that every time I boot now, I
still get the old address in DHCP space that I had before.  To make the
change, I provided network operations with my MAC address, which I got from
the output of ifconfig -a:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr aa:00:04:00:0a:04

All I did at my end to set this up was to change /etc/network/interfaces to
the following:

  auto lo
  iface lo inet loopback

  # The primary network interface
  allow-hotplug eth0
  iface eth0 inet static
  address 10.97.14.253
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  gateway 10.97.14.1

  auto eth0

which shows the new IP and gateway given to me by network operations.
Exactly such a file works fine on a second machine I have with a static IP.
It also conforms to the instructions here:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch05.en.html#_the_network_interface_with_the_static_ip

I didn't list broadcast since the older machine's interfaces file seems to
work fine without it.  DNS stuff is handled by /etc/resolv.conf.
Connectivity is fine except that it's not at the assigned static IP (as
judged by ifconfig -a).

Network operations believes they did their end correctly.  Is there anything
else I should be doing at my end?

Thanks.