No networking at install time = no loopback?

[Jim Cheetham]

I installed Warty on an old PC, destined to become a
server/router/firewall for a small network. At install time I didn't
have any network cards in the machine, so I skipped network setup.

Subsequently, I popped the cards in, and configured
up /etc/network/interfaces to deal with them.

What I didn't immediately notice was that there was no loopback
interface configured - i.e. no way to contact 127.0.0.1. This is
possibly a bad thing - certainly it is bad in "normal" operation, but
might not be bad in a "non-networked" machine.

It definitely is expected by nearly all Unix systems. If the 'main'
Ubuntu apps don't expect loopback(i.e. use sockets for things like mysql
and syslog [which seems to be fine]) then we're OK, and this is a caveat
for non-default users, but I'm not convinced. Any comments?
-- 
-jim cheetham = jim at egressive dot com
www.egressive.com, www.effusiongroup.com