Change your Frontend's IP Address

To change the value of a network device's static IP address find the network device's configuration file and change the line IPADDR=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to IPADDR=yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy where the x 's represent the old value of the static IP address and y 's represent the value you want your IP address to be.

Most likely if you want to change your frontend machine's IP address for connecting to your backend router it is because your frontend's IP addres is already configured to be 192.168.1.1 (which conflicts with the backend router's default IP address of 192.168.1.1) or some other value outside of the acceptable range of 192.168.1.[2-255]. On our machine we use the eth0 device as our network connection to the outside world, but we reserve the eth1 device for our network connection with our backend router. So we want to configure eth1 to have an appropriate static IP address but do not want to change any settings for the eth0 device. On our machine, the configuration file ifcfg-eth1 we're looking for is located in the path /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 . We opened this file and obtained the following output:

# ADMtek NC100 Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 10/100
DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=static
BROADCAST=192.168.1.255
HWADDR=00:04:5a:8f:69:89
IPADDR=192.168.1.1
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.1.0
ONBOOT=yes
SEARCH="mscs.mu.edu"
NM_CONTROLLED=

Notice that the value of the variable IPADDR is set to 192.168.1.1. This is an unacceptable value, so we want to change it. On your machine if this value is outside of the acceptable range of 192.168.1.[2-255] then you will want to change it to a value that is in the given range. The value 192.168.1.2 works well as a default and is the value we used for the HOWTO:Deploy_Xinu tutorial. So simply change that line to an address in the acceptable range and save it. It should now look something like this:

# ADMtek NC100 Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 10/100
DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=static
BROADCAST=192.168.1.255
HWADDR=00:04:5a:8f:69:89
IPADDR=192.168.1.2
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.1.0
ONBOOT=yes
SEARCH="mscs.mu.edu"
NM_CONTROLLED=

Now your IP address should be configured to work with the backend router. Make sure to remember this address because you will need it when the backend is getting the xinu.boot image from the frontend machine across this network connection.