Comment 27 for bug 1301015

Server admins have been restarting networking with init scripts for many years, and for me personally it was rather disturbing to find this no longer works -- as well as to read some of the comments here. Networking that cannot be reliably restarted in the same manner it's brought up at boot time is a major problem. Luckily the init scripts from 13.10 actually still work, so this is my current workaround.

I'm not really sure what someone might do with networking that cannot be manipulated with ifconfig and other lower level commands, and therefore properly managed with init/upstart, but whatever warnings need to be applied, perhaps should be applied to whatever that is. And the fact that some networking devices/configs may not be reliably reloaded/restarted should not restrict the functionality of those that can.

In these various comments I've not heard a compelling reason one shouldn't be able to edit /etc/network/interfaces and restart/reload networking.

Ubuntu Server has been my distro of choice for several years for colo servers, vps's, vm's, etc.. Perhaps it's time to look at a different server distro..