Ubuntu – Wrong MAC address error in virtual console

I observed it on 18.04. It's hard to figure out the culprit - there is a concept of "seats" now, which ignore network logins. There is a concept of logind and login sessions. There is a concept of killing gettys and running them "on demand". There is kernel modesetting, wayland, etc. However, the virtual console was overtaken by systemd, logind, seats, and sessions have plenty open bugs, gettys are now some type of "service".

In the end - if you login as the same user - you're somewhere in "logind" + "session" + "seat" + "resource control", so exiting a getty might mean changes to login/session/seat/accounting, etc.

In my case I had additional usb(?) issues, as my mouse would no longer work, my keyboard was dead, but somehow the touchpad was ok. Or maybe there's something something with dbus on the way. We'll probably never know. My logs didn't say anything interesting, it was mostly: "systemd did this, systemd did that, the result of the service is RESULT". Go figure. It didn't break in debian stretch yet, but with coming upgrades - who knows what's gonna happen.

Actually I had the same problem. I changed the /etc/systemd/logind.conf file adding the line

NAutoVTs=6

And the VCs were not accessible till I had an idea! On my laptop, a Lenovo T490, the default F keys are instead configured as Laptop keys. Therefore they are not usable a F keys directly. To get the Fn keyboard working I have to press:

Fn + CTRL + ALT + F1-12

now with Fn + Ctrl + Alt + F3 key I can get to the tty3. tty1 is the GDM login page, while tty2 is the current X session.