I have seen this in fedora 8/9 systems :-
When I configure the eth0 card and give it a ip address using the ifconfig command from the terminal window and then check out the card from the network config GUI subsequently, it doesnot reflect the ip address as configured through the ifconfig command. However, the ifconfig command continues to show the new ip address as usual.
Why this ?
If I need to change the ip address of the eth0 interface which should be the prefered mechanism - the ifconfig command or the GUI.
Ofcourse I understand that, for the ifconfig command mechanism a line would have to be added to the rc.local file so that the change is effective on every subsequent bootup.

changes using ifconfig doesnt reflect in gui because they are not persistent, if you do change settings using system-config-network / -tui or ifconfig-eth0 file then they would be permanent and would reflect in "network config gui"

you answered your own question the gui hs the built in scrpits to do this or go manual.

thanks I got it now.
One more thing. In fedora distros there are two files /etc/networks and /etc/sysconfig/network. How are they different.
Also, as I understand there should be only one default route for any machine. Consider a situation, where I have two network cards eth0 and eth1. Let us say I have internet accessible through eth0 and a corporate network 10.1.1.0/24 via eth1. Now it makes sense to add a default route through the eth0 and a network route through eth1.
I know how to do that using the route add commands, but how and which files should be set up for permanent effect ? can someone help me with that ? Actually there are so many files in the etc/sysconfig dir that I can't make sense of them !
thanks in advance
nishith

for a common gateway use /etc/sysconfig/networks
for specific NIC route use /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1/0
add
GATEWAY=gatewayip

if you add gateway in both the files /etc/sysconfig/networks and /etc/sysconfig/networks-scripts/ifcfg-eth0/1

/etc/sysconfig/network will supercede