networking problems, but only locally (?)

[Nelson Garcia]

Why wouldn't I be able to access localhost's network services?

I'm experimenting with setting up webmail services in a Linux box that is
working as a web server/mail server/NT Domain Controller/firewall/router in
my home network.
After trying countless different things (installing different versions of
imap servers, apache modules, php modules, and on and on), I discovered that
the problem is that I can't do many things from localhost to localhost
itself (i.e. telnet localhost, ping localhost).

I thought it might be a firewall configuration problem, so I flushed all the
rules and that still didn't do it. I'm using ipchains. I am not able to
telnet, ping, pop email, etc. from the machine to its own ip addresseses or
localhost.  I can do all of those things from other machines in the network
to the Linux box just fine.

My /etc/hosts.allow and hosts.deny are empty, inetd.conf has pop-3
uncommented, /etc/hosts lists all machines and the local host, postfix works
fine.  I'm running Linux Mandrake 7.1.

Here are the results of route, which seems to work fine:
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use
Iface
192.168.1.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth1
24.94.88.0      *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
127.0.0.0       *               255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 lo
default         24.94.88.1      0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

Results of ping:
[root at linuxbox garcianc]# ping localhost
PING localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
ping: sendto: Operation not permitted

Results of traceroute:
traceroute: sendto: Operation not permitted
 1 traceroute: wrote localhost.localdomain 38 chars, ret=-1
 *traceroute: sendto: Operation not permitted

Results of telnet localhost:
[root at linuxbox garcianc]# telnet localhost
Trying 127.0.0.1...

(it just hangs there)


Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.
Aloha,
Nelson