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

[Tom H]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 11:35 AM, Preston Hagar <prestonh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
>
> 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.

If it is a ethX name problem, check "/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules".