Ethernet interface number changed, and old one does not exist, but does not leave IP address

Question

I have a virtual machine with Mandriva 2007.0 (yes, old - unfortunately we do not have a choice here). Anyway, the problem:

Before reboot: active network interface = eth0. No other interfaces present, and network manager confirms this. Static IP address set to 172.31.2.22. No issues, everything working properly, routing et al.

-------Reboot---------

After reboot: active network interface = eth1, with a DHCP address. Network manager shows eth0 as disconnected, and not connectable. When I try to set eth1 up with the static IP address (same one), it says "In Use". I then tried ifconfig eth0 172.31.2.29 just to free it up from the eth0 interface so I could use it with eth1 (since this is connected).

Result:

ifconfig eth0 172.31.2.29
SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
eth0: unknown interface: No such device

Nothing else changed. Any ideas what could be happening, or at least how I can get my IP address back?

Answer 1

What do you get if you try this?

ifconfig eth1 172.31.2.22

Also, what does

route -n

show? Do you have a route for that network? Via what interface?

And finally, what happens if you try to ping the address and then look it up on the arp table with arp -an?

Answer 2

Guessing here (been a while since I saw Mandriva) but if this was Redhat I'd check that you do not have a HWADDR= line in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. If that line exists it will not apply the eth0 configuration to a network adapter with a different MAC address.

Answer 3

If Kudzu is installed on your system, try removing it. If the MAC address of your interface has changed for some reason, Kudzu will interpret this as a new network card and result in the behavior that you've described.

Before you reboot, you may also need to modify a file somewhere under /etc/udev. Try this:

grep -rl 'eth[01]' /etc/udev

And then remove any matching lines. Whereby "remove" I mean "remove them from the file but preserve them for posterity in case you remove the wrong things".

Answer 4

Also see: NIC reordering on RHEL5/CentOS 5