Ubuntu – How to Change the Service Boot Order in ubuntu server 10.04

Unless you have done something weird networking is started before any services are started so I am a bit surprised things are not working.

I am not sure what you have in your /etc/network/interfaces file, but you may want to replace any lines like allow-hotplug eth0 with auto eth0. The hotplug option means that the interface will not be brought up until there is a fully negotiated network link.

I would also check your switch configuration. You may need to enable portfast or whatever the equivalent is on your switches. Portfast allows the computer to skip some of the negotiation related to spanning tree, vlans, and etherchannel and bring up the link faster. But you should not use this feature on any switch ports that are used to connect to other switches.

There is no clear answer to your question. It depends whether the service which needs 172.16.5.243 is a SysV init script or a upstart job.

When it is a SysV init script, you can add dependencies with this header in the init script:

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          scriptname
# Required-Start:    $remote_fs $syslog
# Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start daemon at boot time
# Description:       Enable service provided by daemon.
### END INIT INFO

When it is an Upstart script, take a look at this post. The interesting part is in the accepted answer:

start on (local-filesystems and net-device-up IFACE=eth0)