[plug] Can't connect to ports on localhost

[Nigel Duff]

Hi all,

I put Debian Woody 3.0R1 on this box on the weekend and did a
dist-upgrade to testing. I then installed a 2.4.21 kernel.

Having fetchmail fail to connect to my mail server (then exam3, tried 4
and now postfix before i realised what the problem was) i realise i
can't connect to any local ports.

Telneting (ssh'ing) to 22, 25, 80 etc times out. X isn't connecting to the
font server. Trying to start daemons like portsentry can't bind to ports.

However i can connect to these ports from outside (192.168.1.*, other
shell accounts, browsers connect to the web server). I have cleared the 
firewall and iptables has an ACCEPT policy. hosts.allow/hosts.deny look fine.  

I noticed there wasn't a loopback in ifconfig but bringing up lo doesn't
make a difference (whats correct policy, should there always be a lo
interface?).

ping -c4 localhost gives 100% packet loss.

Ahhh, a traceroute 127.0.0.1 gives;

traceroute to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
 1  i014-016.nv.iinet.net.au (203.59.14.16)  118.748 ms  109.731 ms
110.133 ms
 2  per-qv1-core2.iinet.net.au (203.59.49.163)  129.719 ms  130.099 ms
119.674 ms
 3  203.59.49.177 (203.59.49.177)  109.919 ms  116.820 ms  100.197 ms
 4  hsrp-border.wa.iinet.net.au (203.59.24.247)  129.816 ms  111.988 ms
107.777 ms
 5  * * *

Is this a defaultroute issue? Everything under /etc/network looks ok.

Nigel

Sorry if this email seems disjointed. I have been writing it while
testing.