Dear Maintainer, *** Please consider answering these questions, where appropriate *** * What led up to the situation? Some time back I switched a server to use a static IP address instead of using a DHCP address reserved for that machine. After a recent kernel update, I rebooted the machine but it failed to restart. It stopped booting when bringing up the networking. It was not hung as it would show messages on the screen when I plugged or unplugged USB devices, but it wouldn't respond to keyboard input nor continue to a login prompt. * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)? I tried booting into single-user mode. This produced some more networking messages but still wouldn't move past the networking. Here's what was on the screen when the system stopped the boot process in single-user mode: [ 181.805309] r8169 0000:03:00.0: firmware: agent loaded rtl_nic/rtl8168e-3.fw into memory [ 181.917202] r8169 0000:03:00.0: eth0: link down [ 181.920948] r8169 0000:03:00.0: eth0: link down [ 181.928316] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [ 184.284849] r8169 0000:03:00.0: eth0: link up [ 184.292178] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready I rebooted into sysrescuecd and removed the /etc/rcS.d/S13networking link then rebooted into single-user mode again. After logging in as root, I ran /etc/init.d/networking start. It again failed to complete, but I was able to kill the process and return to a command prompt. ifconfig showed that the network had started so I logged out and continued the boot. * What was the outcome of this action? The server is running normally now, but I can't reboot it remotely if needed because it needs a local presence to start the networking. * What outcome did you expect instead? The server is located in a different city and it didn't occur to me when I was there to try reverting to DHCP to see if that fixes the problem. I don't want to try it remotely since a failure would mean another trip. *** End of the template - remove these lines ***