trouble with loopback - "SET failed"

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

hello everyone,

I've installed Ubuntu on a number of rather slow machines (P2-300-ish)
and while on most of them it works fine (though gnome runs slllooow),
but on a couple I've run into probleems where administrative apps
(root terminal, network-admin, tc) won't run from the gnome menu.
They'll try to start up (I'll get a "starting app X" icon in the
panel), but then silently disappear.  I can start them from the
command line, though, by firing up a terminal and typing, e.g., sudo
network-admin.  To me this seems like some kind of a problem with X
permissions, but it's hard to diagnose as there are no errors in
syslog and of course no error messages on the screen...

On at least one of these machines I have a problem I thought might be
related, in which I cannot set the loopback interface or the eth0.
Both give the same error -- fas as I remember (no network in this
classroom so I can't reproduce my results perfectly):

'Error for wireless request "set Encode" (882A)
   SET failed on device lo; operation not supported'

this is with an /etc/network/interfaces like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

------------
similar files work fine on other machines in the network.  There is no
wireless anything on any of these machines

I have no idea what this means.  Anyone have any ideas?  

Thanks much for your help, it's appreciated.  

best,

Matt


-------------------------------------------
Matt Price	    matt.price@utoronto.ca
History Department, University of Toronto
(416) 978-2094
--------------------------------------------

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