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Loopback Connection Problem with Router

Posted in   Development , Miscellaneous
My router recently died on me and so I had to revert to using a crappy little router supplied to me by Virgin Media my internet provider. I do a fair amount of integration work with the SagePay payment service provider and so I need to configure my router to forward ports to my local instance of IIS in order to accept callbacks from the service. I've never had a problem with this before except now with this router I was getting the router admin page even though it was configured not to allow administration from outside of the network, I tried using my DynDns hostname and eventually got it hitting my local instance of IIS but the page would just never complete loading and hang indefinitely. The solution it seems was actually quite straight forward and requires an entry in your host file which you can find in one of the following locations:
  • Windows 9x - (x):WindowsHosts
  • Windows 2000 - (x):WinNTSystem32DriversetcHosts
  • Windows XP, Vista and 7 - (x):WindowsSystem32driversetcHosts
The entry to be added is your local IP address and the hostname to be used to connect to your local web server e.g. [code]127.0.0.1    www.example.com[/code] For further help and information see Port Forward and Loopback Connections.  

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