can't ping localhost

[Brendan J Simon <brendan.simon@ctam.com.au>]

Andre Berger wrote:

> Finally I figured out it wasn't fetchmail's fault; it wasn't able to
> connect to localhost. The potato installer hadn't installed
> /etc/init.d/network (or started /etc/init.d/networking, don't know
> about that). I made /etc/init.d/network as follows (executable):
>
> #! /bin/sh
> ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1
>
> et voila, fetchmail works. What gave me the idea was that I couldn't
> ping localhost.

I've been having trouble with my G4 starting up slowly.  I get messages like
    portmap: server localhost not responding, timed out
    neighbour table overflow

I can not ping my localhost either but I can ping other machines on the
network.  I will try your solution of making /etc/init.d/network executable.
Note that I do not have these problems on my G3 powerbook.  I have just
installed this recently but I'm sure it was from the same base2_2.tgz file.

Brendan.