Forward
So here’s the scenario, let’s say for the sake of argument that you have a CentOS linux box running with a single NIC, but you want to have 2 IP addresses assigned to this box (for whatever reason). The following is a step by step guide that will walk you through the process of setting that up.
Getting Started
First, you’ll need to determine the interface name of the network device being used. For instance, if you’re running a wired ethernet card with a single port, the name is more than likely going to be eth0, if you’re using a wireless card it might be something like wlan0. First thing you want to do is determine the interface name of this device. An easy way to do this is to run the following command:
You should see something similar to the following:
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:29:3D:2B:AD
inet addr:192.168.0.100 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::20c:29ff:fe3d:2bad/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:2855541 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1205674 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:412143447 (393.0 MiB) TX bytes:539870133 (514.8 MiB)
Interrupt:75 Base address:0x2024
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:4968261 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4968261 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:2009641198 (1.8 GiB) TX bytes:2009641198 (1.8 GiB)
In this scenario, eth0 is the network interface name and lo is the loopback name. Now that we know eth0 is the one we want we’ll need to create a virtual device for it (aka. alias).
Create An Network Interface Alias
First, let’s change directory to the network-scripts folder.
Next, we’ll copy the ifcfg-<interface_name> to the alias name.
In this example we are creating a single alias :0 however, you may create as many as you like. Simply continue to copy the ifcfg-<interface_name> to the desired alias name (ie. ifcfg-eth0:1, ifcfg-eth0:2, etc).
Configure The Alias
Lastly, we need to configure the alias. This is the step where you physically configure the interface to be static or use DHCP and set the routing information.
For arguments sake let’s configure it to be static. Open the ifcfg-<interface_name> in the editor of your choice (ie. vi ifcfg-eth0) and set the following.
DEVICE=eth0:0BOOTPROTO=staticIPADDR=192.168.0.101NETMASK=255.255.255.0GATEWAY=192.168.0.1ONBOOT=yesModify each alias configuration file (ie. ifcfg-<interface_name> for each virtual adapter you add) making sure to change the DEVICE, IPADDR, NETMASK and GATEWAY to suit your network.
Once you’ve modified all of the alias configurations for all the aliases you are going to add, restart the network service and you’re good to go.
You can verify that the virtual interfaces are working by pinging each one individually of by running:
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:29:3D:2B:AD
inet addr:192.168.0.100 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::20c:29ff:fe3d:2bad/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:2855541 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1205674 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:412143447 (393.0 MiB) TX bytes:539870133 (514.8 MiB)
Interrupt:75 Base address:0x2024
eth0:0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:25:90:3B:BB:E4
inet addr:192.168.0.101 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
Interrupt:169 Memory:fb5e0000-fb600000
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:4968261 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4968261 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:2009641198 (1.8 GiB) TX bytes:2009641198 (1.8 GiB)
