Because back when the Internet was first developed the PC didn't exist, the Internet was used mostly by Physicists, computer scientists, government agencies, and large corporations. Nobody thought that using an entire block of Class A addresses would be a big deal. The price of thinking small. As I understand it from my former CCNA instructor, the reason they chose to reserve a part of the normal IP space for testing was so that the test block would behave exactly as the rest of the IP address space did, avoiding the need for a separate set of rules and protocols for testing IP addressing and subnetting. I have not been able to verify this.
Robert Donovan
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip...
How come powers that be gave loopback a zillion addresses instead of just 127.0.0.1/32??
Chris
On Fri, Apr 22, 2005 at 09:16:22AM -0700, John H. Robinson, IV wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I'm trying to understand what loopback interface is used for
and /how/ it is works.
I'm not exactly sure how it works. But it looks like a network interface, except it never leaves the box. This means that a Linux(UNIX) box with no network interfaces (no ethernet, no phone line, no ISDN, no toekn ring,no nothing) can still do all those neat networking protocol stuff.
Anyone got any examples of how an app uses loopback interface
effectively??
Start a webserver. http://127.0.0.1/
Start an ftp server, ncftp 127.0.0.1
Start an X server DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0; export DISPLAY (or setenv DISPLAY 127.0.0.1:0 for you *csh'rs)
I vaguely know it acts like a remote node without
actually being one. I'd like the details.
Not sure what details you need.
-john -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
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