mountvirtfs does not mkdir /var/run and /var/lock

Here's the full problem.

If /var is made to be a separate partition, and therefore /var is an empty directory on the root partition, mounting /var/run fails, which in turns causes ifup lo to fail later because /var/run is now a directory on the new /var partition and isn't wiped from boot to boot, causing a stale network state file to still be there, and lo not to come up, which in turn breaks a lot of things like portmapper, nfs and others.

As far as I can tell, the fix is simply to do what the file in the comment already says, but doesn't do for some reason. Mmmh, I think I see why, it's because it's a bit difficult since / is likely still read only at the time.
If you don't like this, you could put that mkdir at unmount time after /var is umounted, and before the system reboots

--- mountvirtfs.orig 2007-11-30 18:55:55.000000000 -0800
+++ mountvirtfs 2007-11-30 19:35:30.000000000 -0800
@@ -42,6 +42,14 @@

        # Mount /var/run and /var/lock as tmpfs.
        # /var may be on another drive so create /var/run if we need to
+ if [ ! -d /var/run -o ! -d /var/lock ]; then
+ # unfortunately, / is still likely still read only for now
+ if ! mkdir -p /var/run /var/lock 2>/dev/null; then
+ mount -n -o remount,rw /
+ mkdir -p /var/run /var/lock
+ mount -n -o remount,ro /
+ fi
+ fi
        domount tmpfs /var/run "-o mode=0755"
        domount tmpfs /var/lock "-o mode=1777"

The problem occured at least on dapper, but as far as I can tell, gutsy has the same problem.