Following along the Deploying Rails book, I stumbled immediately when
vagrant up hung showing;
Waiting for VM to boot. This can take a few minutes.
even though the server in fact had booted ok.
I found a solution in the mailing list from a Stefano Pallica:
Boot in GUI mode:
:::ruby
config.vm.boot_mode = :gui
Login to the server when booted.
Edit /etc/rc.local and add the following before exit 0:
:::bash
/etc/init.d/networking restart
Worked for me.