[ih] Origin of the loopback interface

[Paul Vixie]

Brian Carpenter wrote:
>>  We could have another little chat about the loopback address in IP. I reached
>>  the conclusion last night that it was never really necessary. All the TCP/IP
>>  stacks that I know will happily send a message to any of their own assigned
>>  addresses, without putting it on the wire. So having a dedicated address for
>>  loopback tests seems useless today.

it's nowhere near useless. i use a some virtual machines that aren't on 
any network except their loopback. grateful am i that i can use IP 
sockets to talk to my own services in that case, rather than having to 
teach all my tooling, and the operating system's tools, to use UNIX 
domain sockets.

even when i have interfaces, they change their addresses, either due to 
DHCP, or mobility, or migration. grateful am i, again, that most(*) of 
my tools don't have to be able to reconnect their sockets when this 
happens. i realize that INADDR_ANY was crafted to solve that problem, 
but modern systems run different servers on the same port number, using 
interface address to disambiguate.

multihoming is one of the great unsolved problems in internetworking. we 
do it properly on routers -- there, the loopback has the router's "real" 
ip address -- but only because the router is on-path and can inject its 
loopback address (which usually is not subnetted) into the topology.

(*) name, file, and time servers have to know what interface they were 
contacted on, and answer from that interface, so they have to 
periodically rescan the interface list -- but nothing else does.

-- 
P Vixie