It run me mad, as I tried to change the IP address of my Raspberry to a static one. I changed literally everything in  /etc/network/interfaces and reloaded, restarted and reboot the device over and over.

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.207
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.0.0
broadcast 192.168.0.255
gateway 192.168.0.

As the above configuration did not help a lot, I figured out that based on the Raspberry model, you need to change settings on various places.

First run

cat /proc/cpuinfo

to determine you model. While getting something like

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor    : 0
model name    : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l)
BogoMIPS    : 2.00
Features    : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls
CPU implementer    : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant    : 0x0
CPU part    : 0xb76
CPU revision    : 7

Hardware    : BCM2708
Revision    : 0004
Serial        : 000000004715b608

you need to use the hardware revision and

Model and Pi Revision	256MB	Hardware Revision Code from cpuinfo
Model B Revision 1.0	256MB	0002
Model B Revision 1.0 + ECN0001 (no fuses, D14 removed)	256MB	0003
Model B Revision 2.0 Mounting holes	256MB	0004 0005 0006
Model A Mounting holes	256MB	0007 0008 0009
Model B Revision 2.0 Mounting holes	512MB	000d 000e 000f
Model B+	512MB	0010
Compute Module	512MB	0011
Model A+	256MB	0012
Pi 2 Model B	1GB	a01041 (Sony, UK) a21041 (Embest, China)
PiZero	512MB	900092

Based on this information you need

Model a

Static IP addresses in /etc/network/interfaces is not the “prefered” way,as it is an old way and DHCPCD5 is installed.

Model b

Static IP addresses are configured in the /etc/dhcpcd.conf and it is  required that /etc/network/interfaces is set to manually.

iface eth0 inet manual

That’s all…