Comment 6 for bug 306469

The problem as I see it was caused by have a static ip setup on eth0 - but the network manager was 'swiping' the connection and attempting dhcp (which is not available on the particular network). I found that the following changes to my /etc/network/interfaces cured problems.

1. On lines following iface use a tab to indent not spaces.
2. Between keywords and data (i.e. netmask 255.255.0.0) use a single space not multiple spaces.

After a reboot this cured my problems.