convert a server to a desktop... what happened?

[Preston Hagar]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Patrick Doyle <wpdster at gmail.com> wrote:
> I decided I wanted a user interface on my Ubuntu 9.10 server, so I
> naively tried the following:
>
> $ sudo tasksel install ubuntu-desktop
>
> and, because I don't like middle-of-the-night-after-a-power-failure
> surprises, I rebooted the machine once that completed.
>
> Much to my surprise, the machine now has a new IP address, despite the
> fact that /etc/network/interfaces says:
>
> # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
> # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
>
> # The loopback network interface
> auto lo
> iface lo inet loopback
>
> # The primary network interface
> auto eth0
> iface eth0 inet static
>     address a.b.c.d
>     netmask 255.255.0.0
>     gateway a.b.0.1
>
> Does anybody have any idea what just happened here?
>
> --wpd
>
> --

This is just a guess, but you might look and see if your nic was
renamed to eth1 or eth2.  I can't remember exactly why this happens
and there is a fix for it, but I know a while back I went through a
fight with Ubuntu where it was renaming the same network card to ethN
+ 1 on almost every reboot.  It would screw up my
/etc/network/interfaces settings because I would have a static IP set
for say eth0, but then the card would be called eth1 on reboot and
just use DHCP since it wasn't defined in interfaces.   Easiest way to
check this is to just do an ifconfig from the command line and see
what the name of the connected interface is.

Preston