If you are experiencing this problem on Fedora Core 15 or higher or on a Red Hat distribution, please see the related solution 1-EUTG50 below: "Why can't I activate MATLAB or run the license manager on Fedora Core 15?"
As of R2009a, you can activate on Linux without an eth0 device as long as there is an eth1 (or ethX.) MATLAB will use the first ennumerated eth device.
For earlier releases, in order to activate MATLAB on a Linux machine, MATLAB must be locked to an eth0 device. In general, a Linux machine with an ethernet device should always have an eth0, but the device may be named eth1, eth2, etc. The eth0 device may just be disabled, in which case you would just have to enable eth0. To activate MATLAB on a machine with no eth0, you can rename the eth device to eth0. The instructions for doing so vary by distribution, but in general you can try the following:
Note: If your machine has no built-in ethernet device, contact the Installation and Licensing team using the link at the bottom of this solution.
Red Hat based distributions:
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In the Red Hat family, the ethernet device names are controlled by the file: /etc/iftab. To rename the ethernet device, open the iftab as root. You will simply need to rename the eth1, eth2, etc. to eth0. An example of iftab is as follows:
# Example /etc/iftab file
eth1 mac 08:00:09:DE:82:0E
eth2 driver pcnet32 businfo 0000:02:05.0
# wildcard name: pick the lowest available name of air0, air1, air2, etc.
air* mac 00:07:0E:* arp 1
Once renamed, restart the machine to enact the changes. You should now have an eth0 device.
Using udev rules
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For other distributions using a 2.6 kernel, you can rename an ethernet device using udev rules. These distributions have a rules file that defines the name of the ethernet device. This file is generally:
/etc/udev/rules.d/network-devices.rules
or
/etc/udev/rules.d/010_netinterfaces.rules (The number in the file may vary)
or
/etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules (The number in the file may vary)
An example of the file looks like the following:
KERNEL=="eth?", SYSFS{address}=="00:37:e9:17:64:af", NAME="eth1" # MAC of first NIC in lowercase
Simply replace the name in the NAME= field to be eth0 and reboot the machine. Once rebooted, the machine should now have an eth0 device
If you are unable to change the device name by following these steps, or if your machine has no built-in ethernet, contact the Installation and Licensing team here:
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