Mysterious 'neighbour table overflow'

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 /etc/init.d/network file anymore so one had to stick with /etc/network. The file /etc/network/interfaces ought to contain all net devices that were to be initialized at boot time. lo was there:

   iface lo inet loopback

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:

   iface lo inet loopback
   auto lo