Creating a socket in Java takes 3 minutes

Sometimes we would see on some of our Linux boxes a 3 minute delay between an attempt to open a socket and a successful connection. This did not make sense... but I eventually determined that this was caused by the loopback device not having an address, or not having a route in the route table.

You can probably fix this by typing the following:

/sbin/ip addr add 127.0.0.1/8 dev lo
/sbin/route add -net 127.0.0.0/8 dev lo

Also, we had these other symptoms:

• /dev/random would block for about 3 minutes, probably because it depends on loopback to get its results.
• Java trying to do a reverse DNS lookup would block for about 3 minutes, probably because it was trying to get results from 0.0.0.0, because /etc/resolv.conf was empty, and 0.0.0.0 was being interpreted as 127.0.0.1... Update: see this postabout a related fix...

Here is a thread where I replied with this information; the thread also suggests other solutions, perhaps to the same or similar problems.

Now if I could just figure out how that Linux box got into that situation...