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Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

tools.ietf.org

121–130 of 179 posts

Re: Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

#121

I've had web browsers perform a web search for 'localhost', or even just redirect me to localhost.com. Annoying.

That's probably due to shitty ISP DNS hijacking/redirecting requests if it can't resolve a name.

I assure you it's not. :)

Re: Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The ancients speak of a time when address and search bars where separated. I think it's a legend.

Hey, Firefox's still alive and kicking. It's quite ancient, comparatively speaking. :-) Old wisemen may refer to it as a fire-breathing reptile, others a bird clad in flames. And despite suffering from declining market share in recent years, prophecy foretold that it will one day rise from the red ashes, stronger and more resilient than ever! (Apologies for running away with the joke)

Firefox has the awesome bar, which works almost exactly like Chrome's omnibox.

Re: Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

#123
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember in the late 90s running into a "mysterious" problem where www.hotmail.com would fail to load, but hotmail.com (without www.) worked just fine. Spent the better part of a year just remembering to not type "www." until one day they made the domain redirect to the canonical name (breaking both). After asking around a bit, someone showed me where the Windows equivalent of /etc/hosts was, and lo-and-behold, the…

> the Windows equivalent of /etc/hosts Which is, bizarrely, etc\hosts (somewhere in C:\Windows\). I've always wondered why they felt the need to make an 'etc' folder just to have the hosts file in it.

Software historians differ on the degree to which the Windows NT 3.1 TCP/IP stack & utilities were derived from BSD, but it's one possible reason.

Re: Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

#125

First, the lack of confidence that "localhost" actually resolves to the loopback interface encourages application developers to hard-code IP addresses like "127.0.0.1" in order to obtain certainty regarding routing. This causes problems in the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 (see problem 8 in [draft-ietf-sunset4-gapanalysis]). That does remind me of the times I was dealing with weird connection issues in some critical s…

Hello me from last week. Had exactly this bug, sometimes nginx couldn't connect to the backend (but very rarely, and not reproducible on demand), which I eventually tracked to the fact that localhost sometimes resolved to ::1 instead of 127, which is what the backend was listening on. Still don't understand why it was only like 1 in 1000 requests, and not every or every other request. Just one more slice of ipv6 myst…

I had a very similar problem recently with docker + nginx. Best I could figure out was the randomness of the problem was being caused by keep alive connection limits. If the connection was opened as IPv4 it would work until it hit the keep alive limit but the new connection might run into the IPv4/IPv6 lookup problem and fail. Never really figured it out for sure. It's definitely thrown some cold water on my plans to go dual stack everywhere all the time. Not sure it's worth the risk of running into these stupid bugs.

Re: Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

#127
post #97

First, the lack of confidence that "localhost" actually resolves to the loopback interface encourages application developers to hard-code IP addresses like "127.0.0.1" in order to obtain certainty regarding routing. This causes problems in the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 (see problem 8 in [draft-ietf-sunset4-gapanalysis]). That does remind me of the times I was dealing with weird connection issues in some critical s…

Ideally, a server binding to "localhost" should create a listening socket for each of its IP addresses (e.g. 127.0.0.1 and ::1), and a client connecting to "localhost" should try each IP address in order, until one succeeds. But a lot of standard libraries (including parts of Java and Go) get this wrong, and pick exactly one IP address arbitrarily. When you combine a buggy client with a buggy server, and their prefer…

Or use a single socket for both protocols (set the IPV6_V6ONLY socket option to false).

Re: Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

#128
There was the time that Keith Henson tried to explain the local loopback address to Scientology lawyers during a deposition...

http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=6289

Henson: (patiently) It's at 127.0.0.1. This is a loop back address. This is a troll.

Lieberman: what's a troll?

Henson: it comes from the fishing where you troll a bait along in the water and a fish will jump and bite the thing, and the idea of it is that the internet is a very humorous place and it's especially good to troll people who don't have any sense of humor at all, and this is a troll because an ftp site of 127.0.0.1 doesn't go anywhere. It loops right back around into your own machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson

Re: Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. The requirement for applications concerned about security properties of localhost names is that the resolved address is bound to a loopback interface, in order to satisfy the test in section 5.1 of this draft. However, I expect many application developers to mistakenly assume that only 127/8 and ::1 are valid loopback interface addresses.

Or, indeed, to assume (as I did for many years) that only 127.0.0.1 itself is a valid loopback address. I was rather surprised when I looked it up and found that it was the entire 127 block.

This can be useful for testing - especially before one could safely assume SNI support - but also for setting up various Web (or other network) servers locally - with an entry in /etc/hosts (so dev-local can point to some other local ip than test-local) etc.

Re: Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

#130
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think (?) I've ever made this typo. How many hits do you get? (I feel like "ocalhost", "locahost", or "localhos" would be more common typos.)

localhost would be a good name for a bar in SF.

There's the Network Operation Center Network Operation Center.

https://www.yelp.com/biz/noc-noc-san-francisco

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