Re: [9front] Loopback device

[Benjamin Riefenstahl <b.riefenstahl@turtle-trading.net>]

Hi hiro,

Thanks for taking the time.

hiro writes:
> loopback is a *link*. it has two sides.
> it's not the same as the 127.0.0.1 feature from other unixes.

Ok.  But that does not answer my questions.  Why doesn't the bind
command from the man page work?  And what *does* loopback do?

Calling it a link with two sides makes it sound like a pipe.  And being
mounted in /net makes it sound like, well, localhost, which also has two
sides, in the sense that I can run a server on it and than connect to
that server, all on the same host.

> localhost/127.0.0.1 is not normally used on plan9.
>
> it doesn't make much sense on a distributed and namespaced system.
> better use more meaningful unique IPs and hostnames and service names
> and then use just those, together with our excellent ndb service to
> resolve it all.

I find I most often use it for testing and for other code that needs an
IP with two sides where I do not want to hardcode, configure or find out
the host name or host IP.

Thanks, benny