Network problems after upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
After upgrading a virtual machine from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, I was getting weird problems with the network configuration. The network would still be brought up, but scripts that were specified in /etc/network/interfaces would not be run when the corresponding interface was brought up.
The logfile /var/log/syslog would contain messages like "ifup: interface eth0 already configured". On other VMs that had also been updated from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and uses a similar network configuration, this problem would not appear.
I found the solution to this problem in the Ubuntu Forums: There was a file /etc/udev/rules.d/85-ifupdown.rules that caused problems with the network initialization. After deleting this file, the problems went away. I guess that this file was present in a rather old release of Ubuntu and thus the problem only appears when a system has previously been upgraded from that release of Ubuntu.