Questions and Answers: Loopback devices

"Going-around-in-circles asks: What is a loopback device and how do I use it?

"DistroWatch answers: The term loopback device can be confusing, in part because it gets applied in multiple areas. I'll cover two common ones here.

"A loopback device may refer to a network interface that basically sends data to itself. This can be handy for testing network commands or for accessing services on your own computer. A loopback device will give you network access to your own machine, even if you're not connected to a physical network. On Linux (and other UNIX operating systems) the loopback network device is called "lo" and you can see this by opening a command line and running

ifconfig

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