SIOCSIFADDR: No such device eth0
eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

When I ran ifconfig only lo showed up. No eth0 to be seen anywhere. After hunting around the net for a few minutes I came across some tips that helped.

First I ran:
ifconfig -a

This showed me two adapters – lo and eth2. Aha!

sudo ifconfig eth2 up brought the interface up for me, and sudo dhclient got me an ipaddress, but after rebooting the problem came back.

Next step was to edit this file:
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Looking at that file, I could see my adapter listed as well as a couple others. I commented out the ones with the wrong MAC address, found the correct one and changed the entry for eth2 to eth0.

I rebooted and everything was gold.

Thank you Google.

I get a lot of people asking me – what are you running at home?

Our Home Network consists of:

Dell Optiplex GX260 running Ubuntu Linux 8.10. I use this box for several things- DHCP server, Squid/DansGuardian Proxy to protect the kids, MythTV for TV recording, SMB file sharing for storing all our photos, movies, music, etc., and rtorrent.

Optiplex GX520 running OSX86 – for the kids. Nice and safe Mac-style.

Original Xbox running Xbox Media Center: http://xbmc.org/ We use this as a front end for all the content on the file server. It’s available for Windows, MAC and Linux too!

Dell Latitude D400 – XP Home. Wife’s Laptop.  Nice and light.

Apple Airport Express – this is used as a wireless bridge. Great multi-purpose device.

Buffalo WLA-G54 – the other half of the wireless bridge. I’ve got a couple no-brand external hard drives I use for backup.

We have two Samsung Blackjacks (I and II). Say what you want about Windows Mobile, but these are two great smart- phones.

Try as I might to keep things stable and working, I have an unconrtollable urge to constantly tweak the settings on all these devices and inevitalby break them -  much to my wife’s dismay.