Setting up a Tor private network

[Jim Spring]

I'm in the process of playing around with Tor (beyond just using it  
as a client -- using it as a client has been no problem).  In so  
doing, I am attempting to first set up a "tor private network" on a  
system and see how things work when running a couple of tor server  
processes.  I am using the make-private-tor-network.py (I've also  
tried hand configuring) but things do not appear to work.

In the debug log, I am consistently seeing the following debug  
statement:

Oct 04 01:12:50.107 [info] router_have_minimum_dir_info(): We have 0  
of 1 network statuses, and we want more than 0.

Is there something I am missing?  It doesn't look lik eroutes are  
being established.  Each of the non-directory nodes does connect and  
give information to the directory node, but that appears to be it.   
Is there a better writeup/discussion on setting up a private tor  
network?

And for the record, this is on both OS X and Linux -- the behaviour  
is consistent.

Thanks
-jim