Comment 70 for bug 19740

How I fixed it....

have a look in /etc/iftab, my file had eth0 linked to the wrong mac address, hence the nic was being given the next available (eth1) as shown by ifconfig -a.

When I changed the mac address in /etc/iftab to have eth0 mac 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (for the actual card), everything started just fine !

In laymans terms, eth1 was the only interface the machine could assign, but the /etc/network/interfaces file was still trying to play with eth0.

Another way to fix it is to change eth0 to eth1 in all places in /etc/network/interfaces.