localhost

[Derek Broughton]

Karl Larsen wrote:

>     In Red Hat there is a special Internet system based on the 10.0.0.0
> ip numbers and it was defined in /etc/host.conf as I recall. 

There's nothing "special" about that.

That is a "private subnet".  Typically private subnets are on 192.168.x.x
(for no better reason than that's the way most routers are configured). 
All 10.x.x.x addresses are also private.  Network routers aren't supposed
to pass private IP addresses to the Internet, which means that I can use
10.0.0.1 on my personal machine, and so can you, and we don't interfere
with each other.  

>     I tried to apt-get install squid and it could not find the
> localhost. Where does Ubuntu put localhost?

This is completely unrelated.  By convention, localhost is always 127.0.0.1
(though the subnet mask is 255.0.0.0, which means that 127.x.x.x always
maps to localhost), and the linux interface name is "lo" (see "ifconfig
lo")
-- 
derek