If you clone a Parallels virtual machine running Debian or Ubuntu you may find that the clone comes up sans networking. I encountered this problem reproducibly with VMs running Debian 5.0, Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 9.10. While eth0 exists and works on the source VM, it does not exist on the clones which instead have eth1. Apparently this is a known issue with Debian-based distributions.

To get the network up on the cloned VMs edit the file /etc/network/interfaces, replacing all references to eth0 with eth1 (or whatever the interface ends up being named on the clone). Save your changes and restart networking.

I was a little perplexed by this when it happened, but given how easy it is to fix and how behind I am on my work, I just don’t care.