When packaging my Vagrant virtual environment (Ubuntu server with a host-only network) to a box file I ran into a problem. The issue was that when I tried to use that box file the host-only network would not work.

With a little investigating I realized the problem was caused by the device name for the network adapter being eth2 instead of eth1. Vagrant uses eth1 in the host-only network interface defined in the /etc/network/interfaces file. Since eth1 network interface doesn’t exist (it is eth2) our host-only network does not work.

The Cause

Ubuntu uses udev to dynamically set device names (eth1 for example). Ubuntu stores persistent udev rules for network devices in the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file. Below is the 70-persistent-net.rules file from the broken host-only network VM.

# PCI device 0x8086:0x100e (e1000)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="08:00:27:57:fd:7b", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

# PCI device 0x8086:0x100e (e1000)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="08:00:27:53:22:32", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth1"

You can see there exists a rule for eth1. The reason the host-only network adapater is assigned eth2 instead of eth1 is because it’s MAC address doesn’t match the udev rule. The reason the MAC address doesn’t match is because when Vagrant creates a new VM (from the box file) VirtualBox by default generates a random MAC address for that network adapter.

The Solution

The solution is to remove the persitant network udev rules immediately before you package the box file. This allows network adapters to be assigned device names without any MAC address issues.

Packaging Steps

1. SSH into running VM and remove the persistant network udev rules file:

    sudo rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
   

2. Shutdown the VM and package it:

    vagrant halt && vagrant package