Loopback stops working randomly

[martin]

I have a very weird problem, the loopback interface of my Debian box stops working from time to time, the only way I found to solve the problem was to do a full reboot.

I have made too many changes to it but most are not really significant (or I wish they're not). The only networking related change was that I moved from pump to dhcpclient3 but actually when my loopback interface stops working I can use the eth interface. This has happened twice for the last 2 days which is starting to worry me.

I've reverted back to pump but if anybody has ever had this problem and can share any ideas that would be really nice as I don't see anything wrong logged and it just feels like a nightmare. I also have another problem related to that, named refuses to start/stop because of that, in the logs it says that it can't bind to 127.0.0.1:953, I had to use the reset button to stop the machine because it just hangs when trying to restart.

kernel 2.4.22-1-686 deb ver 3-686
I'm not sure if any other info is relevant so please ask if it's needed.