How to configure network interfaces in CentOS

Last updated on November 22, 2020 by Dan Nanni

In CentOS, Fedora or RHEL, if you have disabled advanced network management tools such as Network Manager, you can configure network interfaces by using configuration files located in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. For each network interface (e.g., eth0), there should be a corresponding configuration file (e.g., ifcfg-eth0) in the directory. If you would like to configure a network interface, do the following.

Configure a Static IP Address

If you would like to assign a static IP address to the interface eth0:

$ sudo vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
HWADDR=00:05:29:E0:4F:3D
IPADDR=10.0.1.10
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=10.0.1.1
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet

Configure a DHCP IP Address

If the interface eth0 has IP address assigned by DHCP:

$ sudo vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
HWADDR=00:05:29:E0:4F:3D
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet

Once network configuration has been created/updated, you can activate a network interface by running:

$ sudo service network restart

Note that if you are using Desktop version of CentOS, where network interfaces are configured with Network Manager by default, you will need to disable NetworkManager first, before configuring interfaces as described in this post.

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