Tag Archives: Ubuntu 20.04

UBUNTU 20.04 cloned VM same DHCP IP fix

I cloned an Ubuntu 20.04 VM and was frustrated to see both boxes kept getting the same DHCP IP address despite having different network MAC addresses. I finally found on this helpful post which states Ubuntu 20.04 uses systemd-networkd for DHCP leases which behaves differently than dhclient. As wickedchicken states,

systemd-networkd uses a different method to generate the DUID than dhclientdhclient by default uses the link-layer address while systemd-networkd uses the contents of /etc/machine-id. Since the VMs were cloned, they have the same machine-id and the DHCP server returns the same IP for both.

To fix, replace the contents of one or both of /etc/machine-id. This can be anything, but deleting the file and running systemd-machine-id-setup will create a random machine-id in the same way done on machine setup.

So my fix was to run the following on the cloned machine:

sudo rm /etc/machine-id
sudo systemd-machine-id-setup
sudo reboot

That did the trick!


For the systems that registered their hostnames under the wrong IPs, I had to take the following action for my Ubuntu 20.04 desktop as well as my Ubiquiti USG-Pro 4

Ubiquiti: Clear DHCP lease

clear dhcp lease ip <ip_address>

Ubuntu desktop: Flush DNS

sudo systemd-resolve --flush-caches