Loopback question.

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I'm hoping this has have an obvious answer that I'm just missing.

In a lot of the labs im working through there are always loopback's set. I get the point for testing purposes but in the real world where do these come into play?

Thanks
Bruce

 

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Hi Bruce

Loopbacks are used in a lab enviroment to simulate networks (or hosts), in a live enviroment loops backs are used in the following senarios:
OSPF: Loopback can be used as the source of the Router-ID
BGP: The loopback is used to source all updates to other BGP speakers
Tunnels: Loopbacks are used to be the source and destination of tunnel interfaces (Although there are other ways)

The above three are the most common, there are many more uses for them, but in the lab they are great to bring up "pretend networks"

Cheers

Joe

 

Thanks much Joe.

That makes sense to me, I knew there had to be some other reasons than just to be "hosts" in a test environment. I appreciate the explanation.

Bruce