I recently upgraded from Debian 7 to 8 last week. This upgrade had broken most of the packages on the system, which I have spent several days fixing.

Additionally, my static IPv6 networking was no longer working correctly, so I commented out the lines referencing the static IPv6 address, and replaced them with:

iface eth0 inet6 dhcp

I restarted the networking service and verified IPv6 was working, and rebooted the server, and now I'm stuck with the "A start job is running for LSB: Raise network interf..." issue, and cannot get to login prompt through Lish.

Do I have any options to get past this issue or recovering the server without having to wipe it?

I figured out the issue, it appears to be have been from a combination of factors.

After deploying a new image and mounting my old one from it, I was able to edit /etc/network/interfaces. I had to comment out both 'allow-hotplug eth0' and 'iface eth0 inet6 dhcp' (I also tried changing dhcp to auto which didn't solve the issue either) and added back in the lines to set the static IPv6 address.

This at least allowed me to get past the error on boot, but I still wasn't able to ping any IP addresses. It looks like with Debian 8, a new sendmail script was put into the /etc/network if-up.d folder, which was causing further issues for me. I use postfix and don't have sendmail installed, so I had to remove this script to get the eth0 interface to come back up after I brought it down.

Once I solved that I also got a 'RTNETLINK answers: File exists' error when attempting to bring the eth0 interface back up. I solved this by running 'ip addr flush dev eth0'

IPv4 and IPv6 are now functioning and I'm able to reboot the server without any issues.

For some reason setting iface eth0 inet dhcp will still cause the boot process to hang again. And if I set 'iface eth0 inet6 auto' (or removing all inet6 lines entirely) the boot will not hang anymore, however it will pull an incorrect gateway address, causing IPv6 to not work.