[Bug 341006] Re: ease cloning of virtual images by disabling mac address rules

[Richard Thomas]

While it helps in a pragmatic kind of way, carving out exemptions is
really a kludge.

The issue is that both aspects of the issue are valid. Persistence is
important in many situations but in others, it's more important to not
have things changing when they don't need to be changing. Arguably,
there are many more installations that will only be needing one network
card, called eth0 than not but...

At first I thought that the obvious answer is to make this configurable.
Obviously, it is in a "You can edit the files" kind of way but perhaps
an install option "Use persistent nic labelling y/n" would be the way to
go.

Then I thought some more. The real issue is expecting nic labeling to be
more than a convenience. There is zero reason to expect eth0 to mean
anything. It's not the persistent coding that's at issue, it's the
scripts further down the process that are broken. Assigning 192.168.0.5
to eth0 or setting it DHCP? Wrong! The default action should be the
scripts to determine the interface based on rules. Probably by "first
available interface" for most set-ups and probably by mac address where
more complex set-ups are involved.

That's my take on it anyway. Obviously I think more discussion is
warranted. If anyone knows of one ongoing, I'd appreciate a link.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/341006

Title:
  ease cloning of virtual images by disabling mac address rules

Status in “udev” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Cloning an vmware image of ubuntu or ubuntu-based spin-offs like JeOS leads to unwanted side-effects after changing the mac-address as described in 
  http://communities.vmware.com//thread/198298?tstart=0
  and
  http://professionalvmware.com/2009/03/10/ubuntu-cloning-mac-address-change-mayhem/
  Both sources advise to add the following line to ‘persistent-net-generator.rules’:
    # ignore VMware virtual interfaces
    ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:*", GOTO="persistent_net_generator_end"

  Please apply this to the packages.

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