What does it all mean?

[desertranger]

Life, the universe... everything including the following.

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface WFR-M @ 10.134.61.XXX
#auto eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.134.61.250 Server address
netmask 255.255.255.0 Server subnet
network 10.134.61.1 Routers start address
broadcast 10.134.61.255 WTF does this mean or do? Does the 255 have to be there or should it be the server address?
gateway 10.134.61.1 Presumably the gateway to my network,
dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 Not sure where this server is may be an internal to the WFR or part of the WFR network in general. Part of the instructions.
dns-search home The home dir?

Questions you will have? Why the weird addresses? Because my network device is a WFR Mobile connected to the rest of the network wirelessly and hardwired to the server through a gigabyte switch.

Your next question will be: WTF is a WFR? See the attached data sheet. It's what I use for a network router. Wifi Ranger makes a whole slew of extreme ranger outdoor stuff. The switch is a Netgear 5 port gigabyte switch. One port each for: the server, WFR via it's POE and a Raspberry Pi. I have the info to setup the WFR but I am trying to set a static IP on the server to meet the WFRs requirements so I want to know what each line means or does so that I cann apply it where needed in the WFR.


I would appreciate answers in English please.


Nenene

[ricksebak]

> network 10.134.61.1 Routers start address

This is the network address, not the router address. The network address you want is probably 10.134.61.0.

> broadcast 10.134.61.255 WTF does this mean or do? Does the 255 have to be there or should it be the server address?

The 255 has to be there. As for the "WTF does this mean or do" part, wikipedia explains it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_address

> gateway 10.134.61.1 Presumably the gateway to my network,

Yes.

> dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 Not sure where this server is may be an internal to the WFR or part of the WFR network in general.

8.8.8.8 is google's DNS server, which is fine to use. Your DNS server can be inside or outside your network, as long its a valid server somewhere. If you don't specifically know that your router should handle DNS for the network, just use Google's DNS. Also I don't think I've ever seen DNS specified via the /etc/network/interfaces file, but whatevs...

> dns-search home The home dir?

Since I've never seen DNS stuff in the interfaces file, and since dns-search isn't in the interfaces man page, I can really only guess on this one. I would guess that it refers to the local domain on your LAN. For example, if your domain was something.com, and each machine in your LAN had hostnames like machine1.something.com, machine2.something.com, etc. You could set something.com as the dns-search field. Then you could refer to each machine only by its 'first name,' like 'ssh machine1', and it would know that you mean machine1.something.com. If you aren't using a domain or hostnames like that on your local network, you can probably just skip this entirely.