What is the purpose of the Microsoft Loopback Adapter?

Question

Just as the question says, what is the Microsoft Loopback Adapter, and as a bonus, what scenerios as a developer would it be useful? I\'ve noticed it\'s been required when i

Answer 1

Here's an explanation that might be a bit easier to understand - one I'm working on at the moment.

We (a Bank) are pretty damn secure, as you would expect. One of our third party vendors requires the POS java app that we have to use connect to a 172.x.x.x address. Well, that's not routable.

So we have loopback adapters, one for each of their 172.x.x.x addresses, with the address we will allow as the IP. We then use the "netsh" command to redirect traffic...

So any traffic that access, for example, 172.1.1.1 will get intercepted by Loopback Adapter #1 and redirected to 10.2.2.2. The pain is having one adapter per address.

Hope that makes it a little clearer.