I just did an apt upgrade and for the most part everything is looking good. However when I boot up I have no network connection. Here is the result of trying to ping google:

connect: Network is unreachable


I can fix it easily with a simple sudo dhclient eth0 but I was hoping someone would be able to suggest a more correct and less annoying solution.

P.S. I have uninstalled network manager. This is a desktop computer with an ethernet connection and DHCP. I do not need anything fancy.

Make sure you don't run in single-user mode. Fire up a terminal, as root, then issue the commandand hit enter You're now for sure booting in runlevel 2, that has networking enabled by default (I know Red Hat defines different runlevels, each with their own bootscripts, but in Debian, runlevels 2-5 are all equal. How democratic is that ) If that doesn't make a difference, try re-installing the network manager and see if the problem vanishes that way. If it does, find out what packages the network manager depends on, then mark those as keepers when you remove it again.

Fixed it

I just had to change allow-hotplug to auto in my interfaces file