On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 07:44:20PM +0200, Bernd Eckenfels wrote: > On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 10:55:13AM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote: > > On a laptop with a sometimes disconnected PCMCIA network card you > > might find this very inconvenient. The first configuration above will > > always use the loopback address and will always be able to talk to > > itself even if the network is offline since the loopback is always > > available. > > Well, i think if an application want to talk to itself it should use > localhost anyway. I do not know of any applications which talk to itself via > hostname. An application that really wants to talk to a server of which it _knows_ it's running on the local machine will likely use a Unix socket, not a TCP/IP one, to connect to that server. What usually happens when a system is connecting via TCP/IP to the localhost is not an application using the name 'localhost', but the user entering that name; thus, it's not hard to think of a user entering the machine's hostname instead of just 'localhost'. After all, novice users may not know that the name 'localhost' refers to the local machine...
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