WTH: eth0 got renamed to eth2 after an upgrade
While upgrading a remote server from sarge to etch including the new kernel, the server did not come up. After attaching a console (thanks Hetzner!) I found out that the network interface got mysteriously renamed to eth2!
After snooping around a bit, I found out that the culprit was udev, more specifically /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules which says:
# This file was automatically generated by the /lib/udev/write_net_rules
# program, probably run by the persistent-net-generator.rules rules file.
#
# You can modify it, as long as you keep each rule on a single line.
# MAC addresses must be written in lowercase.
# PCI device 0x1106:0x3065 (via-rhine)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:0c:76:af:2f:9d", NAME="eth0"
It also contained two entries for bogus eth0 and eth1 (usb dongle got identified as a network card?). After removing the and relabeling interfaces everything is back to normal now.
November 29th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Thanks a lot for this post!
Google pointed me here and it was exactly what I needed to solve my problem. In my case it had found my old /etc/iftab and converted that to eth0, eth1 in the persistent-net file and later added the same network cards again as eth2 and eth3 as well.
(it seems the script that checks if a specific network card exists in that file is case dependent on the MAC address)
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Thanks for sharing.
March 6th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Does my mac adresse change if I upgrade my computer with some other hardware? For example change the graphic card?
April 17th, 2010 at 7:23 pm
Thanks a lot! You save my evening