Ray Arachelian writes >Well, the loopback is only a single IP address. If they used that, every >net.entity would have the same IP. Not too good. :-) Nope. *Any* IP address starting with 127 is a host loopback address and shouldn't appear outside the host. This from the "Assigned Numbers" RFC (STD 2). 127.0.0.1 is only convention. It's the "first" loopback address.