If anyone can point me to the right thread if I have missed it, please do, I have searched for days.

I have Debian sarge running on 4 different boxes, a couple behind a cisco 1370, and a couple behind a smoothwall firewall. Due to other machines needing to connect I have both the smoothwall and the cisco offering DHCP (on different networks of course! I'm just illustrating I am dumb and have the same problem on 2 different networks with multiple NICs)

I have set static IPs in /etc/network/interfaces:

auto lo eth0

iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet static
address 10.0.0.54
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 10.0.0.255
gateway 10.0.0.1

I then restart networking, and the address sticks. Then after the DHCP lease is up, the interface pulls a dynamic address. This happens on every box.

I've also run etherconf, which fixes it for the life of the lease then back to DHCP. If I cat the interface I still show the static I assigned, and a quick restart resets it to static.

What have I missed?

That's pretty weird. But I use a solution that takes care of both static address and dhcp. It's called "static dchp". My router allows me to set a specific IP address based on the MAC address of the card. So I assign each NIC on my network a particular IP that way, and all the clients can still use DHCP.

I've messed with that, assigning IPs by MAC which didn't work either. It pulled a random address anyway. I don't know what the problem is, I just recently installed these 4 machines in the last 2 weeks with sarge. 3 months ago I also installed sarge on my laptop and was able to set a static IP no problem. I wonder if the newer distro has anything to do with it???

Anyway, thanks for your reply.

Oh ya, maybe I should mention that on my smoothwall I turned off the DHCP server (leases of 1 hour) and assigned static and its been 9 hours and still running static. Hope that clarifies a bit, I still would like to understand why. If anyone knows let me know.