Am 03/07/2011 05:49 PM, schrieb Sean Carolan:
First, if your host is actually communicating with any kind of ip-based network, it is quite certain, that 127.0.0.1 simply isn't his IP address. And, at least for me, that's a fairly good reason.
Indeed. It does seem like a bad idea to have a single host using loopback, while the rest of the network refers to it by it's real IP address.
Acknowledged. At least it will save you a lot of time next year, when you have forgotten about that and are wondering why every machine on the network can reach a service and only the host itself can't (or vice versa...).
Second, sendmail had the habit of breaking if your hostname was mapped to 127.0.0.1, but I stopped using sendmail a decade ago, so I can't verify this. :)
The reason this came up is because one of our end-users requested such a setup in the /etc/hosts file, and I didn't think it was a good idea. Seems it would be better to fix the application(s) that require the data to use the real network IP address.
Most of the time it's a good idea to fix applications before ravishing your network setup to make it work. :)