Comment 12 for bug 1013199

I have the feeling this is probably not related to the be2net hardware at all. I believe to remember vaguely that at some point in the past the behaviour if a bridge interface changed in the way that it will not be up until one of its ports is up. When I follow the exact description of /etc/network/interfaces in the report on a VM I get the same results (ping not working).
For my working bridge setups I also use the bridge extensions in e-n-i which I feel are simpler to handle (though the major difference there is that in the end eth0 is up together with the bridge):

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet manual

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
  address 192.168.1.2
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  network 192.168.1.0
  gateway 192.168.1.1
  bridge-ports eth0
  bridge-stp off
  bridge-fd 0
  bridge-maxwait 0

Somewhere I found notes about the MAC address of the bridge potentially changing to the lowest of the attached ports. Not sure this is really true but at least adding a "post up ip link set br0 address xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx" with the mac address of eth0 never did any harm.

Unrelated to this, with resolvconf in precise (12.04) it is advisable to slowly start moving to the new way of declaring dns. This is done by adding the following lines to the iface section of br0:

  dns-nameservers <ip> [<ip>]
  dns-search <domain>