I recently spent a while trying to make my Xen bridged setup work on Debian with a static IP address so I thought I would share the solution to my problem.

I had the following /etc/network/interfaces

1
2
3

allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet static
  address 192.168.1.254

Xen was configured with (network-script 'network-bridge netdev=eth0 bridge=eth0') in /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp which renames eth0 to peth0 and bridges peth0 and vif1.0 as eth0.

$ brctl show eth0
bridge name     bridge id               STP enabled     interfaces
eth0            8000.80c16ee70a98       no              peth0
                                                        vif1.0

The issue I encountered was that after boot eth0 was configured with the right address but was down. ifup eth0 yielded

RTNETLINK answers: File exists
Failed to bring up eth0.

Running ifup -v eth0 showed that the following command was being run:

ip addr add 192.168.1.254/255.255.255.0 broadcast +       dev eth0 label eth0

Since eth0 had already been assigned an address (probably by Xen's network script), this command would fail.

In order to keep using (network-script network-bridge), I just changed /etc/network/interfaces to the following:

1
2
3

iface eth0 inet static
  address 192.168.1.254
  pre-up ip addr del 192.168.1.254/24 dev eth0 2> /dev/null || true

This is probably not the best solution since Xen's doc indicates that "It is normally much better to create the bridge yourself in /etc/network/interfaces." but this was the modification to keep most of my configuration untouched.