Sites Not Reachable After Linode Restart

I have recently moved the majority of my sites over to my CentOS Linode VPS and I was experience some load issues that prevented me from gaining SSH access.  As such, I decided to restart my VPS.  After the restart, I found that my sites were not reachable…lame.

First, I checked the firewall found here:

/usr/bin/system-config-securitylevel-tui

So…the firewall was fine.  Next, I attempted to restart the network via:

/etc/init.d/network restart

I was surprised to receive the following error:

Bringing up interface eth0: Device eth0 has different MAC address than expected, ignoring. [FAILED]

Alrighty…bizarre.  So with the help of this article, I was able to determine that eth0’s MAC address:

/sbin/ifconfig eth0

was different than the MAC address found in:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

A simple edit to the above file and a quick network restart solved my problem and brought my sites back up! w00t!