gdm and networking

[TBrowder]

While up and running several hosts running RedHat 8 and 9 on a local network, the network went down for an office move.  After graceful shutdowns and the host were moved to our new office, we attempted to restart them without a network connection.  To our surpise, the X server and gdm couldn't bring up the graphical login until the network waas reconnected!  What controls that and how can we start up graphically when the network goes down?   Thanks.   Tom Browder