Comment 8 for bug 447649

Yes, by default in Ubuntu, NetworkManager manages wired connections as well as wireless ones. Whether the connection comes up at boot time vs. at login time is a question of the NM configuration - I think wired connections are *supposed* to attempt DHCP by default at boot time without requiring a user login first, but I could be mistaken.

"the network is not available when mountall tries to mount the cifs share" is a red herring, btw; mountall is supposed to try the mount multiple times - once at boot, once when each network interface comes up - until it succeeds. And this does work, except in the case that bringing the network interface up is blocked waiting for the filesystem.