Network interfaces are renamed or fail to start after MAC address change in RHEL 6
Issue
-
In a RHEL6 virt guest clone (different MAC addresses from those present during initial installation), the network interfaces will not start.
# ifup eth0 e1000 device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization. -
After the MAC address of a RHEL 6 system has changed and the
HWADDRline in the appropriate ifcfg file has been modified, the interface still cannot be found. -
When loading the network device modules,
dmesgshows udev renaming the device to another name, even though the appropriate ifcfg file contains anHWADDRdeclaration.udev: renamed network interface eth0 to eth1 -
After attempting to change the network device ordering by swapping
HWADDRlines between ifcfg files, the devices still do not initialize.
Environment
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6
- Interface with a different MAC address than what was present at install time
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