Our new XServe arrived today and one of the first things I decided to test out was the Server Monitor application. From the Server > Configure Local Machine I set up a static IP address on Port 1 of Lights Out Management interface, but when I tried to connect to this from Server Monitor, it failed with the following error:
4/10/08 5:49:33 PM: Failed to contact server
The strange thing was that I could connect to it from another mac on our network. So I then tried to connect to localhost instead (127.0.0.1), and this immediately worked!
On a similar note, on Windows some firewalls (inc Norton Internet Security) don’t recognise traffic going from the local computer to its assigned external IPs.
That means they don’t recognise it as incomming traffic, so they block it. The only way for a PC to talk to itself is through its loopback IP.
This means you can’t bind anything to an adapter’s external IP and connect to it locally.