More MAC Address Mayhem – SLES Edition

Remember this? No? Well, go back and read it. I can wait. … Done? Good.

The gist of the last post, was that if you cloned, or copied a Ubuntu VM from one host to another, the UUID changes. That UUID is the basis for part of the generated MAC address, which then changes, causing me a headache. Today I found that SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) is guilty of the same binding, only much to my chagrin it stores the rules file with another name: /etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules

The procedure to fix it is the same as listed before:

# This file was automatically generated by the /lib/udev/write_net_rules
# program run by the persistent-net-generator.rules rules file.
#
# You can modify it, as long as you keep each rule on a single line.

# PCI device 0×1022:0×2000 (pcnet32)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:02:51:cf", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

An ugly beast of a file but that last line is the one that needs deleting. Another method of doing this, is to edit the ‘persistent-net-generator.rules’ file to include something similar to:

# ignore VMware virtual interfaces
ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:*", GOTO="persistent_net_generator_end"

This procedure should work with most distributions that use this method to map the NICs and eth interfaces, and it should only be a matter of finding and editing the corresponding file. If you have any questions or comments, hit me up on twitter, or in the comments.