ifconfig bad address le0

Cause

Customer installed the recommended 2.5.1 patches. When he booted, rootuser.sh presented the following errors:

ifconfig bad address le0
le0 arp - revarp failed no rarp replies
bad address hme0
hme0 auto-revarp failed: no rarp replies received.

System fails to: resolve host ip address from /etc/host and no other rarp servers responded to the systems request for it's IP address.

Action

The workaround is to put files before dns [NOT FOUND=return] in /etc/nsswitch.conf

This matches bug number 4040423. Its summary is: if dns [NOTFOUND=return] appears before files in /etc/nsswitch.conf, at boot-time ifconfig complains about bad address. In some cases this can cause the boot to fail.