Network interfaces initialize with weird addresses

[Joachim Achtzehnter <joachim@kraut.ca>]

Hi all,

I've been running amd64 (unstable) without too much trouble for a couple of 
months on my mail server, but there is one major problem, and a recent 
update did not fix this problem:

When the system boots it screws up the network interfaces. There are two 
interfaces, one going to an ADSL modem, the other for an internal network, 
both configured with static addresses in /etc/network/interfaces. Usually, 
one or both of the interfaces have totally wrong IP addresses and subnet 
masks. I typically have to bring them down and up again manually by running 
ifconfig. This seems to always work, but I then have to restart all the 
services because they are still listening on the wrong addresses.

The same screw-up also happens when I run "/etc/init.d/networking start" 
manually. Often, this script seems to hang for a few minutes after it has 
processed the first interface, and one or both interfaces end up with weird 
random addresses.

It seems as if something is getting badly confused, perhaps parsing the 
interfaces file?

Any idea what this might be? Note, this was initially installed as testing, 
then upgraded to unstable.

Thanks,

Joachim

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