Question

I am running Windows 7 and use my iPod Touch to access my localhost sites for testing purposes on WAMP.

I can browse my localhost sites by navigating to my machine IP in Safari on my iPod like so: http://10.0.0.100

I would like to know if it is at all possible to use http://localhost instead, and how I can accomplish that.

Thank you very much!!

Answer 1

Basically, localhost refers to 127.0.0.1 refers to the loop back ip which is the ipod itself so it’s not possible unless you change [localhost to resolve to machine IP which is in this case 10.0.0.100] in the (DNS / hosts file) your ipod is using to resolve domain names in your connection settings and I don’t recommend that.

Following are the steps needed to change the hosts file in your ipod (I warned you already this is not a good thing unless you know what are you doing)

source: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2801892?start=0&tstart=0

Simple solution:

the hostfile is located at: /etc/hosts

To edit this file you need to SSH into your device, If you know how to do this directly just use vi, or nano to edit the file. From windows use WinSCP to access the file system via FTP(SSH). Then simply navigate to /etc/hosts download the file to your desktop, right click and open it with note pad, add your resolver to the last line “192.168.0.100 testserver”, save, and replace the original file with the new one.

/etc/host — example config

# Host Database

#

# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface

# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.

##

127.0.0.1              localhost

255.255.255.255   broadcasthost

::1                        localhost

192.168.0.100       testserver

*To SSH into an ipod it must have OpenSSH installed, usually this requires a jailbreak.