What is loopback ip address

By: Justin Stoltzfus Contributor, Reviewer. By: Satish Balakrishnan. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day. High-Performance Cloud Computing. Techopedia Terms. Connect with us. Sign up. Term of the Day. Best of Techopedia weekly. News and Special Offers occasional. Loopback Address. What Does Loopback Address Mean? Related Question How will Web 3. Synonyms Share this Term. The loopback address allows for a reliable method of testing the functionality of an Ethernet card and its drivers and software without a physical network.

It also allows information technology professionals to test IP software without worrying about broken or corrupted drivers or hardware. The best way to do this is with the Ping utility that comes with most operating systems. This is a simple command-line utility that will try to communicate to an IP address. If the command is successful, the Ping utility will return results similar to the following. The exact information returned will vary depending on your operating system:.

This indicates that the network card and drivers are functioning properly. An entire Class A network itself is reserved as loopback network. The loopback network in IPv4 is So, the range of loopback addresses in IPv4 is from As mentioned in previous lessons, The loopback IP addresses are always available.

Any data traffic sent to IPv4 loopback addresses from The most widely used IPv4 loopback address is