So we had a power outage at our house, and I had to shut down my Myth backend server for the duration, and decided to try and fix its sometimes-spotty NIC at the same time. Every so often I got a completely dead response so trying to scp something there was painful… so I swapped the hardware. Unfortunately, when it came up, the machine realized the card was a new one (3c905, they’re still astoundingly reliable) and complained. First it told me it was the wrong MAC address, then it gave up and assigned it eth1. Unfortunately, all my settings were bound to eth0 and when I changed the /etc/network/interfaces to reference eth1 instead, some parts still didn’t work… mysql complained, and mvpboot just was unwilling to do anything.
Bad news.
I finally found a thread about replacing a NIC in (I think) Ubuntu 8 but when I tried the solution, the file they referred to (
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
) didn’t exist. Back to Google.
Next I found an older forum exchange about ubuntu 6.06 NIC replacement breaking the network, and I was able to find that file:
/etc/iftab
and in it was the old MAC address. Commented the line out, restored the settings to be eth0, rebooted, and bingo I’m back in business. Wish I had found it last night…
