On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 11:34:16AM -0800, Thomas Hartman wrote:
> I don't know the answer to your question, but what distro are you running?
>
> It ran out of the box for me on debian 7.1 but not on latest ubuntu.

Confirm cannot reproduce on Debian 7 (Wheezy), at least without
disabling the network (I physically can't).

Guesswork:

Probably happens in

handshake::do_discover_external_ip()

in

src/network/handshake.cpp

of libbitcoin:

    template_version_.address_me.ip = localhost_ip();
    std::vector<ip_address_type> corroborate_ips;
    // Lookup our IP address from a bunch of hosts                             
    ip_address_type lookup_ip;
    if (lookup_external("checkip.dyndns.org", lookup_ip))
        corroborate_ips.push_back(lookup_ip);
    if (lookup_external("whatismyip.org", lookup_ip))
        corroborate_ips.push_back(lookup_ip);
    if (corroborate_ips.empty())
    {
        handle_discover(error::bad_stream, ip_address_type());
    return;
    }

If networkng is unavailable, IP resolution fails.