Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialisation in linux

However if you clone a VMWare you’ll notice that it kills your network interfaces throwing errors like the one listed below:

#ifup eth0
Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialisation

What’s happening here is that when you clone your VM, VMWare apply a new MAC Address to your network interfaces but they don’t update the linux configuration files to mirror these changes and so the kernel doesn’t firstly can’t find or start the interface that matches it’s configuration (with the old MAC Address) and it finds a new interface (the new MAC Address) that it has no configuration information for. The result is that only your networking service can only start the loopback networking interface and eth0 is dead.

So here’s how we fix it:

Remove the kernel’s networking interface rules file so that it can be regenerated

# rm -f /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Restart the VM
# reboot

UPDATE your interface configuration file
# vim /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0
Remove the MACADDR entry or update it to the new MACADDR for the interface (listed in this file: /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules).

Remove the UUID entry

Save and exit the file

Restart the networking service
# service network restart