Edited /etc/cat/interfaces and changed the reference to eth0 to eth1, rebooted and voila it automatically configured DHCP on its own. christopher@ubuntu:~$ dmesg | grep eth0 [ 48.816224] eth0: VIA Rhine II at 0x1e400, 00:16:35:7e:74:69, IRQ 11. [ 48.816961] eth0: MII PHY found at address 1, status 0x786d advertising 05e1 Link cde1. christopher@ubuntu:~$ dmesg | grep eth1 [ 21.396000] eth1: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0xCDE1 [ 42.908000] eth1: no IPv6 routers present This shows that eth1 was configured before it took a look at eth0. Notice that the eth0 lines are the same as before. So is the ifconfig. This was the change I made: christopher@ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/network/interfaces # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5). # The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback # The primary network interface auto eth1 iface eth1 inet dhcp