Nope

Russell,

0.0.0.0 is not the same thing as 127.0.0.1. You may get the same behaviour in some cases due to some implementation details, but that does not mean that both are the same!

127.0.0.1 means "The host this software is running on". In contrast, 0.0.0.0 means "Any host"; it can be used in software as the C constant "INADDR_ANY".

While it is true that connecting to 0.0.0.0 from software such as ping will yield the same result as connecting to 127.0.0.1, it is absolutely not true that listening to 0.0.0.0 (in a bind(2) kind of way) yields the same result as listening to 127.0.0.1. After all, in the latter case you will only accept connections that originate from localhost; in the former case, you will accept any connection, whether from localhost, the local network, or the big and evil Internet.

I presume you will have at least some firewall in between, but still.

That being said, however, 127.0.0.2 is an alias for 127.0.0.1. So is 127.0.1.0. And 127.255.0.1. And, really, anything in the 127/8 network range. Now that has no utility—there can be use in having a /24 reserved for loopback, but a /8? Who would ever need 16M ip addresses for the local host? Is there even an operating system that can keep track of that many IP addresses?

Oh well. not as if I care. And, after all, IPv6 has fixed that little issue. Although it might be fair to say that they overcompensated there a little bit.