Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 13:00:48 -0500 From: Edwin Gustafson <Gus@Economics.net> To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Newbie success: changing networks without rebooting Message-ID: <v04003a01b2f34490c5db@[192.168.1.2]>
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Greetings, >On Wed, 17 Feb 1999, Sue Blake wrote: >> When you do something new or exciting like setting up your first >> network, installing FreeBSD for a friend, or learning how to reboot >> properly for the first time, tell us about your ups and downs, gloat >> about your victory. It's always nice to discover that someone else out I haven't posted here before, but Sue's invitation has inspired me to share something I've just mastered. It's something that saves a lot of time but may not be obvious to people coming from the personal computer world. (It wasn't obvious to me.) Yesterday I needed to temporarily move a computer running FreeBSD from one network to another. To do this I had to physically relocate the machine as well as change its IP address. This computer happens to be a laptop, so the battery made it unnecessary to shut down the system while in transit. But I still had to change the IP address. Coming from the PC world, I'm used to rebooting the computer every time a change like this needs to be made. I'd been doing this with FreeBSD even though I knew it wasn't supposed to be necessary. I had been editing /etc/rc.conf and rebooting every time. Yesterday I finally decided to learn how to handle these things the BSD way. A few minutes with _The Complete FreeBSD_ and I was typing: # ifconfig zp0 192.168.1.9 where zp0 refers to the PC card ethernet adapter and 192.168.1.9 is the new IP address. That's all: no waiting for the system to shut everything down, reboot, and then start everything back up again. Now I understand why certain guru friends of mine howl in protest when confronted with the "You must restart your computer for these changes to take effect" message in Windows' Network control panel. I'm sure all of this is old hat for BSD veterans. But for me it's a minor revelation. Because of it, I'm a little closer to running my BSD system with a BSD approach instead of a PC one. ----- Edwin Gustafson Gus@Economics.net To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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