Probably stupid question, but

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2013-09-03 at 20:43 +0100, Colin Law wrote:
> > And it should definately be intelligent enough to understand that if someone
> > has defined a static ip address for their machine, it should not just
> > blindly ignore it and go for DHCP. Maybe it could check first to see if DHCP
> > is available. Maybe it can still do its thing but in such a way that the
> > static IP address is kept as it was. I don't care what it does, as long as
> > it does not break network connectivity. And currently, (or at least last
> > time I checked), it does.

> I can't understand what is the problem that others seem to have with
> fixed ip addresses in network manager.  I use fixed IP addresses
> simply by setting the Method to Manual in IPv4 Settings in NM and
> entering the address etc.  I have no problems at all with this.

I agree with you Colin.  I've done this many times and it works
perfectly fine.  You can set IP address, netmask, broadcast, DNS server,
etc. using the NetworkManager configuration.  If there is a situation
where this fails, please describe it.

NetworkManager absolutely supports static IP addressing.  What it
_doesn't_ support is "Joe's Linux Distro Network Interface Configuration
File Format".  If you want static IP addresses then you need to use
NetworkManager to configure them, you can't go behind its back and muck
around with underlying files such as /etc/network/interfaces
or /etc/sysconfig/networking or whatever magical file format your distro
of choice invented, and expect it to work.  NetworkManager is not an
Ubuntu-only tool, it's a generic package used by most distros.

If you want to manage your network interfaces by hand and edit
underlying files directly, then don't use Network Manager; that's fine.
But don't blame Network Manager for being broken when you're
purposefully breaking it.