[plug] Another network question

[Derek Fountain]

While I'm asking silly network related questions...

What does this do?:

ifconfig lo:1 10.0.1.1

Some form of aliasing according to the context I got it from, but I'm not sure 
what aliasing means in network terminology. That IP address means nothing to 
my 192.168.x.x based home network (but the example works so it obvious makes 
sense to the machine!). Also, "lo" seems special to this sort of usage; I 
tried changing it and got a "no such interface" error.

What does it all mean? :o)

-- 
"...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE 
...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, 
they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003