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<page title="Debian Tips">

<h1 align=center>Mysterious 'neighbour table overflow'</h1>

<p>Networking After upgrading from potato to woody I noticed a couple
of 'neighbour table overflow' messages on the screen during the next
boot process. If it wouldn't be the laptop I wouldn't have
noticed. Thes messages seemed even slowing down the boot process with
regard to some related NFS problem.  A little investigation has shown
that the lo device (i.e. 127.0.0.1) was missing. Believe me, the
output of ifconfig looked strange, only eth0 was there, quite
irritating. For some strange reason that device wasn't initialized at
boot time.

A quick glance prooved that there was no
<code>/etc/init.d/network</code> file anymore so one had to stick with
/etc/network. The file <code>/etc/network/interfaces</code> ought to
contain all net devices that were to be initialized at boot time. lo
was there:

<pre>
   # /etc/network/interfaces -- configuration file for ifup(8), ifdown(8)

   # The loopback interface
   iface lo inet loopback
</pre>

A friend told me that a second line for the lo-interface was missing
that would actually set it up at boot time. Looks like the semantics
of that file was changed from potato to woody without scripts taking
proper care of it. The proper file looks like:

<pre>
   # /etc/network/interfaces -- configuration file for ifup(8), ifdown(8)

   # The loopback interface
   iface lo inet loopback
   auto lo
</pre>

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