[plug] Can't connect to ports on localhost

[James Devenish]

Hi,

In message <20031202030534.GB10184 at iinet.net.au>
on Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 11:05:34AM +0800, Nigel Duff wrote:
> However i can connect to these ports from outside (192.168.1.*, other
> shell accounts, browsers connect to the web server).

When you connected to machine M from any other machine, you must have
been specifying a non-loopback address, and packets will have been
directed to a physical interface such as eth0 on M. But when you connect
from machine M to 'localhost', packets should normally be directed
through the 'loopback' interface.

> I noticed there wasn't a loopback in ifconfig but bringing up lo doesn't
> make a difference (whats correct policy, should there always be a lo
> interface?).

Yep, you should always plumb a loopback interface, and it should always
be set up with loopback addresses like 127.0.0.1 (IPv4), 0.0
(AppleTalk), ::1/128 (IPv6), etc. Otherwise, M will try to reach these
addresses by directing the packets its default router (provided by
iiNet, in your case).