Moving an Ubuntu VMware image

14 June 2008 10:59

I downloaded a VMware virtual machine installed with Ubuntu 8.04. On boot, the networking didn't work. After restarting networking, eth0 gave errors, and afterwards only lo and eth1 (down) were returned by ifconfig -a. I couldn't get eth1 to start with various types of coaxing.

I remembered that VMware assigns a new MAC address to the network interface on virtual machines when they are copied.

I even remembered the file to edit: /etc/iftab. Unfortunately, this file didn't exist. Hmmm.

The mapping of device names to MAC addresses now seems to be stored in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. I copied the MAC address for eth1 to that for eth0 and deleted the entry for eth1.

I ran /etc/init.d/networking restart. Still no dice. How does the system remember what networking devices are registered? No idea. So I took the Windows solution, and now it's up and running. Which should save me a bit of embarassment next week, since I claimed setting up virtual machines was trivial.

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