Problem restarting the network service

Question

I'm working on network configuration, testing a few different approaches to see which one suits me best. I have installed a new instance of 14.04 server and I have only installed the following: openssh-server, samba, smbclient, cifs-utils, ntp and ntpdate.

I will obviously need to restart the networking service after changing the configuration.

If I use sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart nothing happens, no error message, it simply returns to the command line.

If I use sudo service networking restart then I get the following:

stop: Job failed while stopping
start: Job is already running: networking

If I reboot the machine then it starts with the new network configuration working (or sometimes not working!) as expected.

Am I taking the correct approach by using either of those commands or is there something else I should do?

Perhaps this indicates an issue with my networking service that is a bit beyond me (for now)?

Solution

IIRC apparently that's not how you were suppose to restart the networking (even though that's how everyone always did it) so they finally broke it to force you to restart it by sudo ifdown eth# && sudo ifup eth#