Sometimes Windows XP suddenly restarts, for instance as a consequence of Window Update, and VMWare Player 3.0 does not properly shut down my Centos 5.3 virtual machine.

After restarting the Centos virtual machine does not seem to have an IP address, as "ifconfig -a" shows. I can not connect to it with ssh either.

So I try restarting the network using the following command:

/etc/init.d/network restart

The error message is:

eth0 has different mac address than expected

The solution is simple. Change the value in field HWADDR in file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. Use the value of HWaddr in the section eth0 of the output of "ifconfig -a" as the new value.

After editing the MAC address, i.e. field HWADDR, in file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 you can restart the network again with

/etc/init.d/network restart