Loopback in "interfaces" Wrongly Commented on Upgrade

[Jameson Burt <jameson@mnsinc.com>]

As I upgraded from slink to potato,
I believe an interactive comment mentioned that 2.2.* kernels 
(I run kernel 2.2.16) need no explicit loopback.
Because of my selection, the upgrade script produced a file
        /etc/network/interfaces
with all lines commented.
In particular, this "interfaces" file had the following line
        # iface lo inet loopback
not
        iface lo inet loopback
UNCOMMENTING THIS LINE GOT MY SYSTEM WORKING AGAIN.

Before this, I could no longer use my modem for ppp connnections,
my domain server failed lookups,
and for 5 hours I concentrated on failure of the package nfs-common.
In particular, in the script /etc/init.d/nfs-common,
a line with /sbin/rpc.lockd failed.
Later, I thought my local bind/named was failing from the upgrade.
This extensive failure I saw arose, as I said above, from the default
     /etc/network/interfaces.


I first saw this error as an NFS problem,
since booting hung there for about three minutes.
However, from the boot log in /var/log/messages,

Jul 19 21:17:06 rabbit kernel: Adding Swap: 128484k swap-space
                          (priority -1)
Jul 19 21:17:06 rabbit kernel: Adding Swap: 128484k swap-space
                          (priority -2)
Jul 19 21:17:06 rabbit kernel: eth0: Setting full-duplex based on MII#0
                          link partner capability of 05e1.
Jul 19 21:17:06 rabbit kernel: RPC: sendmsg returned error 101
Jul 19 21:17:06 rabbit kernel: neighbour table overflow
Jul 19 21:17:07 rabbit kernel: neighbour table overflow
Jul 19 21:17:11 rabbit kernel: RPC: sendmsg returned error 101
Jul 19 21:17:36 rabbit last message repeated 2 times
Jul 19 21:17:56 rabbit kernel: portmap: server localhost
                          not responding, timed out
Jul 19 21:17:56 rabbit kernel: RPC: sendmsg returned error 101
Jul 19 21:18:26 rabbit last message repeated 3 times
Jul 19 21:18:46 rabbit kernel: portmap: server localhost
                          not responding, timed out
Jul 19 21:18:46 rabbit kernel: lockd_up: makesock failed, error=-5
Jul 19 21:18:46 rabbit kernel: RPC: sendmsg returned error 101
Jul 19 21:19:16 rabbit last message repeated 3 times
Jul 19 21:19:36 rabbit kernel: portmap: server localhost
                          not responding, timed out
Jul 19 21:19:37 rabbit kernel: neighbour table overflow