Comment 3 for bug 1420885

Can't we order the nic interfaces in the 70-net-persistent rules file before the first boot of the native OS.

I believe when we jump up to 14.X this may handled with systemd changes http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/PredictableNetworkInterfaceNames/

I haven't tried this, but I believe it also works

Sometimes you get an incorrect matching of ethernet device numbers and MAC addresses. Sometimes this is really important, like when running in a VM and each device is assigned to a different VLAN.

bring down means stop the networking so that there is no state [successfully running service networking stop]
Bring the network interfaces down, then
modify /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules (or its equivalent)
re-load with udevadm control --reload-rules and finally
re-trigger with udevadm trigger --attr-match=subsystem=net
bring the network interfaces up.
I was surprised how well this worked.