I am fairly familiar with setting up servers, and ubuntu is generally my flavor of choice, but I just installed 12.04 desktop and I am seeing some behavior in network manager that is really puzzling. The network connection works fine if I leave it set on dhcp, but I would like a static IP address for my new web server. When I go into network manager and edit the connection for the one and only NIC I can select MANUAL from the dropdown menu but as soon as I do the Save button becomes greyed out. Even after filling out all fields for the connection it is still grey and I am unable to save the static IP connection information. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I'm hoping there is just some new setting that I am unaware of....

On another note, if I stop the network manager and go edit the interfaces file (and the appropriate hosts/routes/dns files), I do get a static ip address assigned and I can contact my server from the outside, however, the server cannot find the internet. Can't ping even its own ip... I can ping the loopback interface though.

I'm really confused on this one. Hoping someone can offer some help.