Error “Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization” in RHEL6 Guest machine

The cloned machine will display the below error message while starting network interface eth0 as per /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

"Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initializtion"

Below is /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 for the newly cloned guest which is a copy of the original machine from which a clone was created.

DEVICE="eth0"

HWADDR="00:0C:29:8F:54:85"

NM_CONTROLLED="no"

BOOTPROTO="dhcp"

ONBOOT="yes"

Resolution:

Below steps can be followed the resolve this issue.

On the source machine, do the below actions.

Ø  Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net rules and remove all reference to ethx - mac address mapping from it. Or

Ø  Remove the 70-persistent-net rules from the /etc/udev/rules.d

Ø  Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and remove HWADDR line from it.

Ø  Reboot the machine.

The cloned machine will now have eth0 recognized properly and /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net populated with correct eth0 -> MAC address mapping.

Root Cause

This happens because the original machine has a udev rule like the below one in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules which maps eth0 to its mac address. The cloned machine should have a different mac address, hence the new mac address cannot be mapped to eth0. Hence it selects the next available name (eth1),

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="52:54:00:c5:53:c7", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"