Rackspace Ubuntu 11.04 servers broken without a network

I’ve got an odd problem. I create a 4 GB VM in the Rackspace Cloud with an Ubuntu 11.04 server image. After it’s created, I can’t ssh to it, and ping returns zero bytes.

I can get to it from the Rackspace dashboard console. But it’s not on the network. Creating a VM without a network is kind of useless.

I first alerted Rackspace to this over a week ago. It’s still present in our VMs, and now impacts our company in a very serious way. Rackspace says their Operations team has to check the host machine to fix this. You’d think this would be easy to isolate and resolve, but….nope.

Does anybody else have this problem?

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Update: Rackspace confirmed this is a system-wide problem! Until it’s fixed, after I rebuild a VM I have to ask their customer support to goose the underlying host machine before it’ll respond to the network. Yikes.