Static IP address without removing DHCP

[Dotan Cohen]

I need to ensure that a particular machine has a static IP address. Is
this the right way to configure /etc/network/interfaces?

auto eth0
    iface eth0 inet static
    address 10.0.0.7
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 10.0.0.138

The current configuration, using DHCP looks like this:
$ ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 90:2b:34:a9:c5:ae
          inet addr:10.0.0.7  Bcast:10.0.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::922b:34ff:fea9:c5ae/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:190131 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:142571 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:130422046 (130.4 MB)  TX bytes:28887979 (28.8 MB)

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:65536  Metric:1
          RX packets:13281 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:13281 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:1351192 (1.3 MB)  TX bytes:1351192 (1.3 MB)

$ route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
0.0.0.0         10.0.0.138      0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0
10.0.0.0        0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     1      0        0 eth0


I'm asking here as I don't want to get into a situation where I can no
longer communicate with the machine while testing different
configurations. Thanks.

I took the basic config skeleton from the Ubuntu server guide Network
Configuration page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/serverguide/network-configuration.html

-- 
Dotan Cohen

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