MAC attack - not what you think

This one got me the other day and no, not a Mac Apple Computer either! A MAC ethernet address.

I was setting up a new VMware Server 2 appliance for a development environment in use with the Symfony framework. The base OS was Ubuntu 9.04 Server.

Well I like to back a backup of the raw OS before I put anything out there since it took a bit to make the VMware appliance. It is simple - or so I thought, you just make a disk copy of your appliance folder.

Well, I did that, as well as manually edited the .vms file. Turns out, vmware assigned a mac address in the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-presistent-net.rules file to eth0 that had been already assigned to the appliance hosting machine.

Example:

# PCI device 0x1022:0x2000 (pcnet32)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:0c:29:bd:5f:db",
NAME="eth0"

# PCI device 0x1022:0x2000 (pcnet32)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:0c:29:bd:5f:e5",
NAME="eth1"

Basically to fix this, delete the etho entry and change the eth1 to eth0 and restart the appliance.

Wow, one of those obscure moments solved via google.

Be well,

Jeffrey