[TriLUG] Running a Virtual Network on a Laptop

[Andrew Perrin]

Not knowing the specifics of the application you're talking about, I'd
guess that it's looking for a connection on the IP address that was
assigned to eth0; not finding it, it blocks.

You could probably hack it by assigning the IP address to an alias to lo
(but I don't know for sure if this will work); the routine would have to
be something like:

insmod ip_alias
ifconfig lo:1 <your regular IP address here>

However, the better way to handle it is to tell your app to talk to, and
listen on, the appropriate IP address, which for lo is 127.0.0.1 by
definition.

ap

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin at unc.edu - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
 Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
      269 Hamilton Hall, CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA


On Thu, 28 Feb 2002, Scott @ Home wrote:

> Hi Folks,
> 
> I'd like to be able to run the client-server software my company is 
> developing on a standalone laptop system.  I believe the RedHat 7.2 
> laptop has the resources necessary to run the server and client 
> applications simultaneously.
> 
> I've tried running them with the network disconnected ("ifdown eth0") 
> and the applications all hang.  I'd hoped that the loopback device (lo) 
> would be sufficient for them to operate, but apparently there's 
> something in the network service that becomes unavailable when I do 
> this...  They'll run but hang as soon as they try to connect to the 
> server app, which appears to be running fine.
> 
> I had someone tell me today that you could bring up a virtual network on 
> Linux on a standalone machine and fool applications into thinking there 
> was a running network.  He said you could do this through IP Aliasing.
> 
> The client-server applications I'm working with don't care whether their 
> IP address is different, though.  They just have to be on a networked 
> system.  I can make them all run on a single node on my LAN at home, for 
> example.
> 
> I'll admit that I don't know all the ins and outs of network 
> functionality, and that's part of what's holding me back.  Has anyone 
> set up something like this on a laptop?  Any suggestions/recommendations?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Scott Chilcote
> 
> 
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