After a reboot of VMware, the twiki debian virtual appliance wouldn’t come up for me. After a lot of research and troubleshooting, I found out that the ifstate file at /etc/network/run/ifstate was corrupted or missing. After adding recreating the file and adding the two lines:
lo=lo
eth0=eth0
the virtual appliance booted up without a problem. Fortunately, I had a fresh virtual appliance to reference. This was for a system with a static ip and bridged network.