What is the routing table in Linux?

You may have used the IP address 127.0.0.1 before. You may not have used 127.0.0.2. What is this? Try it out by listening on this IP address:

$ nc -l 127.0.0.2 1234

Now, from the same machine, you can open a TCP connection, and have a conversation:

$ nc 127.0.0.2 1234
hello!
hey

This was new to me! How is this working? Let’s see what’s going on at the IP packet level using tcpdump:

$ sudo tcpdump -n -i lo
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on lo, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 262144 bytes
00:41:53.550184 IP 127.0.0.1.39070 > 127.0.0.2.1234: Flags [S], seq 273312456, win 43690, options [mss 65495,sackOK,TS val 633989 ecr 0,nop,wscale 6], length 0
00:41:53.550192 IP 127.0.0.2.1234 > 127.0.0.1.39070: Flags [S.], seq 858890764, ack 273312457, win 43690, options [mss 65495,sackOK,TS val 633989 ecr 633989,nop,wscale 6], length 0
00:41:53.550200 IP 127.0.0.1.39070 > 127.0.0.2.1234: Flags [.], ack 1, win 683, options [nop,nop,TS val 633989 ecr 633989], length 0

All traffic happens over the lo interface, or “loopback”. I was aware that packets to 127.0.0.1 would go to the loopback interface, but it seems that packets to 127.0.0.2 also go to the loopback interface. Notice that 127.0.0.1 is still used as the IP address opening the connection, and 127.0.0.1 is used in the response packets. How does this happen?

Linux has some procedures to determine which network interface should get a packet. This procedure is called “routing”. Linux determines the route based on the destination IP address of the packet. The procedure uses the Linux “routing policy database”, which is a list of rules. We can see that list with the ip tool:

$ ip rule show
0:	from all lookup local
32766:	from all lookup main
32767:	from all lookup default

Linux visits each of these rules in order until one of them determines a route. So Linux first runs the rule from all lookup local. This says to look in the table called local. We can see that table with another ip command:

$ ip route show table local
broadcast 10.0.2.0 dev eth0  proto kernel  scope link  src 10.0.2.15
local 10.0.2.15 dev eth0  proto kernel  scope host  src 10.0.2.15
broadcast 10.0.2.255 dev eth0  proto kernel  scope link  src 10.0.2.15
broadcast 127.0.0.0 dev lo  proto kernel  scope link  src 127.0.0.1
local 127.0.0.0/8 dev lo  proto kernel  scope host  src 127.0.0.1
local 127.0.0.1 dev lo  proto kernel  scope host  src 127.0.0.1
broadcast 127.255.255.255 dev lo  proto kernel  scope link  src 127.0.0.1

Our packet with destination 127.0.0.2 matches the following route:

local 127.0.0.0/8 dev lo  proto kernel  scope host  src 127.0.0.1

127.0.0.2 matches the subnet 127.0.0.0/8, i.e. 127.*.*.*. (So we could even have used the address 127.42.43.45.) dev lo says, “put this packet on the loopback device.”

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What is the routing table in Linux?

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