First of all a short note: this problem shows up only when you update some packages manually. I only upgraded initscripts package from RH 6.2, procps remained the same from RH 6.1 (2.0.4-2). But since new initscripts take advantage of sysctl, the script /etc/rc.d/init.d/network was not able to set up system parameters properly. After running sysctl manually, the following error message showed up: # sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf error: unable to open preload file '/etc/sysctl.conf' Upgrade to procps-2.0.6-5 solved the problem. It would be much better, however, if there was a specific requirement to have the right version of procps.
The initial requirement was for procps >= 2.0.4, since that's where the sysctl program first *appeared*. However, it wasn't fixed right until 2.0.6-5, so that is probabyl a better requirement. Will be fixed in 5.14-1.