New to Ubuntu

[bill purvis]

Thanks for all the responses to my newbie problem.
I have another - I have just had to reboot my
system and when it came up the network was in
a weird state. This machine is networked via a server
running Mandrake which also acts as firewall etc.
trying to 'ping' my server I got the old 'network unreachable'
error message. 
Running ifconfig eth0 gave:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:A0:D1:BB:37:4E  
          inet6 addr: fe80::2a0:d1ff:febb:374e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:23 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:6 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:3727 (3.6 KiB)  TX bytes:468 (468.0 b)
          Interrupt:19 Base address:0x6000 

No, IP4 address. Running the System/Administration/Network
tool showed the correct IP4 static address. I changed this
slightly and ifconfig then showed the new IP4 address.
Changing it back to what I had originally set it resulted
in the network then being operational again. I'd really
prefer not to have to go through this whenver I reboot.
Anyone any ideas?

Bill
-- 
+---------------------------------------+
| Bill Purvis, Amateur Mathematician    |
|  email: bil at beeb.net                  |
|  http://bil.members.beeb.net          |
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