luci fails to start with errors 'Luci startup failed: Luci did not start after X seconds.' in logs in RHEL 5

Environment

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 with the High Availability Add On
• A system with Luci installed
• The localhost entry from /etc/hosts is commented out, missing, or modified such that "localhost" does not resolve. For example:

#127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost