Ethernet bridging weirdness

[Douglas Stanley]

Hello all,

I'm about at my wit's end, and I really hope some one might be able to
shed some light on this topic for me.

I have two physically identical servers, both running 10.04.1, both
are completely up to date. Both are set up to be kvm hosts. On both
machines, I have an IDENTICAL /etc/network/interfaces, the only
difference being two lines where ip addresses are specified.

The problem is, that both machines need a bridge set up on boot, so
that virtual machines can access it. One machine works 100% fine, the
other, the second bridge never comes up!

My /etc/network/interfaces file can be seen at:
http://gist.github.com/579592

Also, I just did a fresh re-install of 10.04.1, and performed the
updates on the machine that isn't working, thinking that maybe I did
something slightly different during the initial install. But it still
doesn't work.

If I type:
sudo ifup br1
I get: "ifup: interface br1 already configured". But, ifconfig doesn't
list either my eth2 or my br1 devices. Also, brctl show doesn't list
my second bridge. But, if I edit /var/run/network/ifstate and remove
the br1=br1 line, then run "sudo ifup br1", it comes up just fine.
Similarly, if I "sudo ifdown br1;sudo ifup br1" that also works.

Any idea why it isn't coming up automatically on boot, when my other
identical machine does just fine? Or even where I might look to try
and figure it out myself? There are no error messages in any of the
log files that I could find. I'm truly stumped!

Thanks,
Doug

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