this page may be related
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/UbuntuVarRun



Another obnoxious discovery about Ubuntu's /var/run stuff

Today, I had the distinct pleasure of discovering that /var/run must
exist on the root filesystem, even if you have a separate /var
filesystem. If your root filesystem does not have such a hidden
/var/run, you experience mysterious failures of various boot stuff,
including an inability to bring up the network; for bonus points,
nothing gives you any meaningful error messages.

(For bonus points, the default Ubuntu server startup sequence wipes out
the console scroll buffer, so you can't scroll back to see many boot
time messages anyways. And nothing captures them elsewhere.)

I find this incredibly obnoxious, because it means that if you move your
root filesystem around, you must move it with something that peeks under
mount points (effectively only dump or an equivalent will do) and you
must not, on any account, move it to a place with a replacement /var
already mounted in place. (Guess what we did, not knowing any better.)

If you started out without a separate /var filesystem and now want to
move to one, apparently your life just sucks.

There are some comments in /etc/init.d/mountvirtfs that suggest that it
should be recreating the root filesystem's /var/run if it doesn't exist.
However, there are two problems:

there is no actual code in mountvirtfs to do this, just comments saying that it 
should be done.
trying to do it wouldn't help anyways, because the root filesystem is mounted 
read-only at this point.
(While /var/lock also exists on the root filesystem and is necessary, don't 
worry about it; LVM will helpfully create it for you in early startup as a side 
effect of making its /var/lock/lvm directory. So you only have to reboot twice 
to have everything working right with that.)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/377432

Title:
  ifdown: failed to open statefile /var/run/network/ifstate:

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