Yeah..I thought that, too. However when I try it, I make two observations...

1) I get a warning message stating that the IP and netmask are inconsistent. I don't understand why that is, though.
2) It doesn't fix the problem.

In fact I tried it that way first, since it seemed fairly logical, but eventually the only time it didn't throw that error at me was when i used the 255.255.255.255 netmask. I'm guessing whatever my problem is has something to do with this command, but I've tried a range of options and none of them seem to work.