Question

I find it odd the other day that ping ..localmachine works on Windows 7

If you Win+R, type \\..localmachine\ it will open local machine share folder.

I have a web server listen on 0.0.0.0 port 8080

This python script works

urllib2.urlopen('http://..localmachine:8000').read()

And this is not defined in hosts file.

There seems not documentation mentions this, can anyone share some knowledge with this?

• How does these kind of host names work on Windows? Any other pre-defined host names I should know?
• Are there any significant security considerations we need to take care in our code?

Answer 1

Thanks to user ShaneMadden answered my question here

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms738520(v=vs.85).aspx

On Windows Server 2003 and later if the pNodeName parameter points to a string equal to “..localmachine”, all registered addresses on the local computer are returned.