First off, this is a new behavior, documented in the 11.10 release notes, that I actually developed together with Scott Moser as an effort to make server boot more reliable.
Commenting out lo
will mean you have no local network capability, which will break some programs when they try to use the network. It will also cause your system to never boot because it is so critical. So leave these two lines:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
The bits about eth0
meant that your machine was configured to wait for a dynamic address to be assigned to it before the network is considered UP. In pre-upstart
versions of Ubuntu (8.10 and earlier), the system would have waited up to 60 seconds for this before continuing the boot. When upstart
was added, this condition wasn't waited for anymore, because network interfaces that were not always expected to be plugged in are better managed by something like network-manager
.
So, if you have a server, you probably want to wait for a dynamic address, otherwise the system will boot without all of its networks available (which it does if it takes more than 2 minutes to get an address). If you have a laptop that you don't always expect to be plugged in to eth0
, then configure eth0
in network manager, and remove only those lines from /etc/network/interfaces
, which should get rid of your boot delay.
Keep in mind, there's a known bug with VMware
and dbus
that also causes this message.
allow-hotplug
instead ofauto
in the /etc/network/interfaces file, e.g.,allow-hotplug enp0s25
theniface enp0s25 inet dhcp
. This tells the server to not wait for the interface to light up with a dhcp answer.