If you’ve moved an Ubuntu virtual machine or modified it and then suddenly had a problem getting networking to work, you might want to read through this page, because I’ve figured out a workaround to get it working again.

The full error message is this:

eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device 
There is already a pid file /var/run/dhclient.eth0.pid with pid 6847440 
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.4 
Copyright 2004-2006 Internet Systems Consortium. 
All rights reserved. 
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/ 

SIOCSIFADDR: No such device 
eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device 
eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device 
Bind socket to interface: No such device 
Failed to bring up eth0.


Run this command to edit the interfaces file, and then change eth0 to eth1.

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

After you run this command to restart networking, everything should likely start working again:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

You should be able to run a ping command, or use ifconfig -a and everything will be working.

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