Configuring the network

Next, let's look at some basic network configurations so that we can communicate with the outside world. I am assuming that there is an Ethernet interface, eth0, and that we only need a simple IPv4 configuration.

These examples use the network utilities that are part of BusyBox, and they are sufficient for a simple use case, using the old-but-reliable ifup and ifdown programs. You can read the manual pages for both to get the details. The main network configuration is stored in /etc/network/interfaces. You will need to create these directories in the staging directory:

etc/network
etc/network/if-pre-up.d
etc/network/if-up.d
var/run

For a static IP address, /etc/network/interfaces would look like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
    address 192.168.1.101
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    network 192.168.1.0

For a dynamic IP address allocated using...