Ethernet bridging weirdness

[Douglas Stanley]

Ok, so out of pure frustration, I went and re-installed both machines.
I did them side by side, so I knew I typed exactly the same thing on
both machines. I then ran my setup script post-install to finish
configuring them.

Not sure why, but now both machines behave exactly as I expect. The
only thing I did notice when re-installing them, was that I had
partitioned their disks differently the last time (one was guided lvm,
the other was manually partitioned). I may have also know I set
noatime and possibly nodev on a few of the mounts when I did it
manually, but not sure why that would have caused the problems I
encountered. Honestly, I did the same exact re-install as I just did a
few days ago, the only thing I did differently was I left the manually
partitioned disks last time, and added noatime to the mounts. That is
the only thing I did differently this time.

I'm pretty sure I only set noatime on most of the mounts, but I may
have thrown nodev on like /tmp and /home. Could something like that
have caused the bridges to not come up? Now I kind of wish I saved the
/etc from before when it didn't work so I could do a post-mortem.

Anyway, I apologize for wasting everyone's time, and I'd like to thank
everyone who responded. I appreciate the community behind ubuntu!

Doug