Comment 13 for bug 802538

to add a bit of detail here - this is a vmware esx 4 environment, with a number of hosts providing a number of guests, with the "typical" characteristics of this sort of environment [shared storage from a san array, vmotion, etc. etc.]. in this particular scenario, a minimal ubuntu server install is used as a vm template. it's maintained and kept up to date, and new guests are deployed from the template. when a new guest is deployed, a new mac address is generated and subsequently there is then a discrepancy between the actual mac address of the new system, and the data in 70-persistent-net.rules. it hasn't been a huge deal, as there are a handful of various tasks associated with preparing/deploying the template [generate new ssh keys, set new unique hostname, etc] within which i've included simply deleting 70-persistent-net.rules.

this has worked quite well up until 11.04. the newly deployed guest would boot, and a new 70-persistent-net.rules file would be automatically be generated, with the correct mac address.

so the question i have is why is this filter here? what condition is it intended to address? was there a previous bug with which this filter was added?