So I needed to setup a crossover connection and set a static ip. Here are the settings i decided upon.

ip: 192.168.0.1
network: 192.168.0.0
netmask: 255.255.255.0
broadcast: 192.168.0.255

So to set this with ifconfig you don’t really need the broadcast entry but the following will work sufficiently:

ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

This will setup the interface and bring it up. Then just set the other interface on the other end of the crossover cable to another available ip in the range (.2-254)

You can also set the broadcast address if necessary by adding the “broadcast 255.255.255.0? to the above command after the netmask argument.

Mario Loria is a builder of diverse infrastructure with modern workloads on both bare-metal and cloud platforms. He's traversed roles in system administration, network engineering, and DevOps. You can learn more about him here.