I’m using Debian Etch as a guest OS under VMWare. When you copy the VM (to another machine or another instance on the same machine), VMWare wants to give it a new UID (you should let it so you don’t end up with duplicate machines). A side effect is that you get a new ethernet MAC address. In Debian Etch, a side effect of that is that it thinks you have a new network card but it doesn’t forget about the old network card, so instead of the network interface being eth0, it is now eth1. And the next time you copy the VM, it is eth2, and so on.
It is really a pretty simple fix, once you know where to look. The clue is that udev is what is remembering the old MAC address. In my VMs, the addresses were in:
/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules
It is just a plain text file. Delete the lines with the old MAC addresses and change the last one to be eth0.
July 12, 2007 at 2:15 pm |
Thank you, this was exactly my problem. I wish Google had brought this page up well before wasting a solid hour searching around. ;-)
August 3, 2007 at 2:51 am |
Beautiful, you just saved me a lot of time! I never expected to fix that within 5 Minutes. Thanks for posting!
August 10, 2007 at 5:18 am |
Aah beautiful!
Thanks, works like a charm! :)
December 17, 2007 at 7:44 am |
This has been annoying me for some time and to fix it I’ve been randomly trying different eth[n] numbers, with limited success but wanted to know what the actual issue was.
Googling for “vmware etch networking” you were number one and issue fixed in 2 minutes.
Ta!
February 3, 2008 at 11:40 am |
This was driving me bonkers!
Thank you thank you!
May 16, 2008 at 4:21 pm |
Lifesaver, many thanks!
June 23, 2008 at 5:58 am |
Thanks!
It’s so simple when you know it ;-)
Thank you
August 31, 2008 at 2:14 am |
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September 16, 2008 at 10:01 pm |
You’re the man!
Thank you so much!
November 4, 2008 at 9:23 pm |
I was getting crazy….. your solution saved my sanity :)
January 6, 2009 at 9:22 am |
Thanks, pal!
February 17, 2009 at 2:51 pm |
Thanks so much. I would never have figured it out. This issue has been plaguing me for ages (on different systems).
February 20, 2009 at 5:27 am |
Thx, working at a glance !