Description of Problem:

Even with such configuration for a boot kernel:

...
CONFIG_NETLINK=y
# CONFIG_RTNETLINK is not set
CONFIG_NETLINK_DEV=y
...

and after inserting a required network device support "manually"
an attempt to bring a network up with 'service network start'
fails with

Cannot send dump request: Connection refused

and not even a loopback device is configured. Configuring everything
"by hand", using 'ifconfig' and 'route' which luckily are still
available, works just fine (or you are not reading this :-).
Do current Red Hat network startup scripts require a presence
of RTNETLINK?  If yes then it should be available in "BOOT" kernel
as this is the only kernel which can be possible to boot after
something else in an installation was botched (like a bad partition
table, see    ).

BTW - an attempt to bring up networking with a kernel compiled with
supplied "BOOT" configuration resulted in the following messages:

Cannot open netlink socket.
Address family not supported by protocol.