What happens if I disable the loopback device using ifconfig?

Question

I found out that I can disable my interfaces using

$ sudo ifconfig lo down

I want to know what happens if I disable my loopback interface forever. It's disabled now and nothing has changed. Are there any disadvantages that I can't see now?

Solution

It is used by various local services which will fail when lo is down. Many local service make use of a Unix socket and of course those will continue to work. Those using a TCP socket, however...

Here is a picture of my firewall and we can see that there are quite a few packets going through....

Comments

[mikewhatever]

Next time, search before asking: superuser.com/questions/521916/…

[Mohammad Kholghi]

@mikewhatever would you please explain about your link? That link is about if we can disable loopback interface from the kernel. I want to know what is the disadvantages of disabling loobpack using ifconfig command.

[mikewhatever]

You may want to run sudo lsof -i and see for yourself.