Renaming network interfaces one time (repopulating /etc/iftab?)

[Michael Matthews]

Does anybody know how to take 2 new MAC addresses for newly attached NIC's
and make them the default /etc/iftab eth0 and eth1?  That is, I think I need
to repopulate the /etc/iftab file with the new network interface names (eth0
and eth1) mapped to the new MAC addresses instead of old MAC addresses that
are no longer attached.  Since this is a VMWare virtual machine guest OS,
doing this manually is not an optimal solution, since I can't depend on the
people downloading my VM to do this correctly.  Right now, the only option
that I can see is to make a personal script for this, but I just keep
getting the feeling that one already exists for this exact situation.

So, my problem is that VMWare changes the MAC addresses whenever a new guest
OS is downloaded and started up.  In Ubuntu, this results in the new network
interfaces being named eth2 and eth3 (in my situation), instead of eth0 and
eth1.  Of course, this means that /etc/network/interfaces has no record of
of what to do with these interfaces, namely using DHCP to get eth0 an IP
address.....so the result is that I can't connect to the network with this
new guest OS.

What I need to fix this is a way to make the new virtual NICs into eth0 and
eth1 instead of eth2 and eth3.  I GUESS that means editting /etc/iftab, but
like I said, these will be guest OSes downloaded by other users, and I can't
rely on them to do this correctly.  Any suggestions? =)

Thank you in advance for any help!  Please let me know if I have
misidentified the problem as well, if you know something better.
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