When changing network cards (either physical or virtual) it’s often the case that the new card gets a higher interface number. For example, your old card was identified as ‘eth0′ and the new card gets identified as ‘eth1′. This may cause problems in your scripts (networking scripts, iptables settings, network traffic counters, etc.). But it’s also not as clean as you would want (you’re obsessive about these things, admit it!). Fortunately, we can easily renumber the ethernet interfaces!
Bringing up interface eth0 fails: device not present
When you change your network cards (or assign a new virtual network card using VMware for example), you may see the following error message when starting networking:
Bringing up interface eth0: Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization. [FAILED]
The reason for this is that the new network card has a different MAC address and the system is still looking for the old hardware (MAC) address. Let’s fix that.
Renaming your network interface to eth0
CentOS Linux, amongst others, stores the network interface hardware configuration using udev. The network interface configuration is stored in the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. Open this file using your favorite editor (vim) and start editing. You’ll see two configuration lines, like:
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTR{address}==”00:0c:29:de:ad:20″, ATTR{type}==”1″, KERNEL==”eth*”, NAME=”eth0″
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTR{address}==”00:0c:29:de:ad:2a”, ATTR{type}==”1″, KERNEL==”eth*”, NAME=”eth1″
As you can see, the system now has the configuration for two interfaces: eth0 and eth1. The eth0 line contains the hardware (MAC) address of the old network card, the second line the new one. Because your network configuration scripts (where IP address settings are stored) are bound to a specific device (eth0) and the system doesn’t know about eth1, it can’t bring it up. To fix this, simply rename “eth1″ to “eth0″ in the NAME field, and remove the first line.
Write the hardware address down, you need it in the next step.
Updating hardware MAC address in networking script
Apart from the hardware configuration, there is also a networking configuration for the interface. This configuration is stored in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. In this file the IP address configuration is bound to the specific interface. This file most of the times also contains a specific hardware address, the MAC address of the interface the IP address should bind to. Look for the “HWADDR” line and update its value to the one you wrote down earlier from the udev configuration.
Reboot the system to update ethernet numbering
Now finally, reboot your CentOS Linux system and enjoy your re-established connectivity 
Thanx THANX YES YES FINALLY this is my solution for my virtual network card on a vmware workstation many thanks
Thanks a lot!!!!! problem solved!
Cheers
Damn, I wouldn’t have thought of the kernel change. Thanks a bunch dude, solved the problem immediately!
This used to happen on Ubuntu servers, and thanks for the post as it shed light on it happening on CentOS now too.
If I moved a VM around, clone or something, I would just actually remove the directory as it’s regenerated on boot.
rm -f /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
Worked great on CentOS 6.3 running on Hyper-V 2012 after installing the MS Integration Tools.
I removed the legacy network adapter and configured the “real” network adapter to show as eth0, using the same IP address and all.
Thank you!
thank you, finally I found the solution to my problems with virtualbox´s VMs. Very clear!
Thanks a lot !!!!!! My problem resolved
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