Comment 27 for bug 329106

FWIW this behaviour is still present in Ubuntu 10.04.

I am using Ubuntu in Virtual Box where it is all too easy to change MAC addresses.

The certain fix, with a single card, is to replace the entire contents of /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules (in effect the history of all cards seen) with the single, "catch all" rule:

 SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", NAME="eth0"

The single interface, regardless of type or MAC address is then named eth0

I tried multiple interfaces with similar lines (NAME= eth1, eth2 etc) but the order in which rules are processed (or interfaces detected?) does not appear predictable. It was quite common to see interfaces named, for example, "eth1_renamed"