I swapped out some NICs recently on a few of my lab machines. These machines had a working install of Ubuntu Server 9.04. After installing the NICs and rebooting, ifconfig showed nothing but lo details. The first thing I did was ensured that the cards were seen by the OS by typing:
lspci | grep Ethernet
to which I received the output:
02:04.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100 (rev 08) 02:05.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100 (rev 08)
This was correct as my new NIC was a dual Intel NIC. From there I issued the command:
sudo mv /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules.old
I reboot the system and all NICs were re-assigned to the correct Eth* interface. Note that that the 70-persistent-net.rules.old will contain the old configuration should I choose this new NIC doesn’t work out for the system.