[X4U] Hosting on Dot Mac

[David Ledger]

>From: Daly Jessup <jessup at san.rr.com>
>At 19 02  +0000 11/12/07, David Ledger wrote:
>>If you mount your iDisk you'll see a 'Sites' folder. It works
>>similarly to the one on your Mac. The one on your Mac appears as
>>http://loopback/~username. The one on your iDisk appears as
>>http://homepage.mac.com/username/ as in
>><http://homepage.mac.com/david_ledger/> (the video clips of my
>>grandson were parked there for the family when he was 'new' and we
>>only had 1GB, the rest being backups. Must make it a real site
>>sometime). Those pages are hand coded and uploaded by drag and drop.
>>I don't keep a local fast copy of my iDisk.
>
>David,
>How did you set up a server on your Mac to use a "loopback" address?

I expected it to be 'localhost' but it didn't work. My bookmarked 
link was 'loopback' and that worked. I havn't used the webserver on 
my Pb for some time because of the space.

I have an /etc/hosts file which has a
127.0.0.1       loopback
entry as I would expect. Maybe everyone doesn't have one. I will have 
copied it from my G4 which went to OSX at 10.0 beta and probably 
needed it back then.

'loopback' and 'localhost' _should_ be different, as was until M$ 
misunderstood it and wrecked it.
loopback should point to 127.0.0.1 so that access to loopback goes 
direct and misses out a lot of the IP stack routines. localhost 
should point to the real IP address of the machine so that access to 
it goes through all the software to the interface and all the way 
back. Useful for testing (and a very easy way to get your IP 
address). When M$ started with their TCP/IP look-sort-of-alike they 
made them both 127.0.0.1 and it's stuck.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk