I am running an Ubuntu 10.04 server installation and I recently had to switch it from DHCP to static ip. I edited /etc/network/interfaces file and switched
"iface eth0 inet dhcp"
to
"iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.167
netmask 255.255.255.240
network 192.168.1.160
broadcast 192.168.1.175
gateway 192.168.1.161"
You'll notice the IPs are a little strange. This is because the sever is now on a special subnet dedicated to isolating specific servers. I also edited the resolv.conf file to include the proper DNS servers (including one of Google's just in case all hell broke lose).
The problem is that, seemingly randomly, the machine will lose the ability to talk to the outside world. I know the machine is still up, but it acts like it has no networking at all. I think part of the issue is that there is no DHCP running to this subnet (nor will there be) and the dhclient seems to still be running on occasion which causes some sort of conflict (no idea what) which causes networking to die. I cannot, however, remove the dhcp3-client package as it also causes the ubuntu-minimal package to be removed and that would be bad.
So, any ideas? What might be calling the dhclient and what can I do to stop it from running?