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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