Xenial Xerus Ethernet Fixup for the Raspberry Pi

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Xenial Xerus has a peculiar bug that can cause a Raspberry Pi to lose Ethernet connectivity after a reboot. Several individuals noticed it after an apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade while following instructions for building Swift on a Pi 3.

To fix this, power down the Pi, remove the microSD card and reinsert it into another system and then mount the Pi filesystem with something like:

# mkdir pifs
# mount /dev/sdX2 pifs

where X depends on where your microSD was mapped. I turn to dmesg|tail to find this:

[6099875.497524] usb-storage 2-4:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[6099875.497771] scsi host21: usb-storage 2-4:1.0
[6099876.498806] scsi 21:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Generic  STORAGE DEVICE   0817 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[6099876.499682] sd 21:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg8 type 0
[6099876.832189] sd 21:0:0:0: [sdi] 31293440 512-byte logical blocks: (16.0 GB/14.9 GiB)
[6099876.833257] sd 21:0:0:0: [sdi] Write Protect is off
[6099876.833266] sd 21:0:0:0: [sdi] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[6099876.834375] sd 21:0:0:0: [sdi] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[6099876.840573]  sdi: sdi1 sdi2
[6099876.845072] sd 21:0:0:0: [sdi] Attached SCSI removable disk

In this case /dev/sdi2 is used.

Once your filesystem is mounted navigate over to the Pi’s /var/log/ directory:

# mount /dev/sdX2 pifs
# cd pifs/var/log

Using grep -a, search for the phrase renamed from in syslog:

root@darthvader:/tmp/pifs/var/log# grep -a "renamed from" syslog
Sep  4 21:59:59 ubuntu kernel: [    5.533471] smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0 enxb827eb9721d5: renamed from eth0

Notice the new Ethernet device name enxb827eb9721d5. Now go to the /etc/network/interfaces.d/ directory on the Pi filesystem:

root@darthvader:/tmp/pifs/var/log# cd ../../
root@darthvader:/tmp/pifs# cd etc/network/interfaces.d/

Edit 50-cloud-init.cfg and replace instances of eth0 with the new device name enxb827eb9721d5:

# cat 50-cloud-init.cfg
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto enxb827eb9721d5
iface enxb827eb9721d5 inet dhcp

Unmount the filesystem:

# cd /tmp/
# umount pifs

Return the microSD card to the Pi and reapply power. Your Pi’s Ethernet should now be available.

A special thanks to @tjw for providing clues to the fix for this issue!

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