[luau] localhost connections

[Jimen Ching]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, Charles Lockhart wrote:
>Anybody know how far down the osi ladder a client/server connection
>where both the client and server are on the same machine and the
>connection is to localhost would go?

Hey Charles,  ;-)

The OSI model is just a generic representation of a networking protocol
stack.  An actual protocol would map its own layers to the OSI layers.
So there is no OSI protocol per se.

So unless you have a specific protocol in mind, there is really no general
answer to this question.  But since the other respondents seems to imply
that you were thinking of the TCP/IP stack, then the answer is the IP
layer.  The IP layer is where the packet is routed.  If the destination is
the localhost, then it is simply sent back up the stack instead of sending
it to the next lower layer.  This also applies to any aliases on the
interface.

TCP/IP does not map to the OSI model in a one-to-one manner.  But many
books consider the IP layer somewhere in the network layer of the OSI
model, which is layer 3.  The thing is, the data link layer (which is
layer 2) maps closer to TCP.  So TCP/IP kind of maps up-side-down to the
OSI model.

Hope I didn't confuse you more than I helped.  ;-)

--jc
--
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching at flex.com     wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org