The desktop is ready and the packages are installed and now it’s time to see how its PHP package is built. Wanted to see it in browser so I run the:

$ php-7.0 -S localhost:8000

And frozen.. Thought it might be some security restriction that doesn’t let the PHP process to listen on a TCP port. But it was not!

So, let us run it on 127.0.0.1:8000. Oops, it’s working.. But why?

After some investigation, I’ve found something really interesting.

The ping utility could not ping(resolve, to be specific) the localhost but when I type the $ host localhost it shows the 127.0.0.1.

Something is so weird here. How come that ping(8) and host(1) are NOT using the same resolve(r) function in their code?

After some investigation, I found that they’re coming from totally different planets and have nothing in common!

Of course I could “get rid of” this problem by adding the lookup directive to the /etc/resolv.conf but where is the fun in doing so?

To be updated perhaps.