Renumbering ethernet devices in Linux

Question

I have a VMware machine running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) with three virtual ethernet NICs. For some reason, the kernel has decided that these NICs are: eth3, eth4, and eth5. There is no eth0-eth2. How can I force the kernel to renumber these three ethernet devices to be eth0, eth1 and eth2?

Answer 1

As root, edit the NAME= fields in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules, save, and reboot.