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Hey All: I'm running a linux firewall with an SSH server, that allows me to connect to a Windows PC behind the firewall (IP 10.10.1.45). I use PUTTY and the Microsoft Loopback Interface to connect to the Windows TCP port on the client computer, so that the loopback IP is at 10.255.255.1. Connections to this allow me to access the Windows PC's shares at //name. I would like to know if there is a way to make the client computer resolve connections to the windows share //name to both IP's (10.10.1.45 AND 10.255.255.255). Is there an easy way to do this? Can it be done through the hosts file? Thanks for any help!

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You're using the broadcast address for loopback? – Shane Madden Mar 31 '11 at 1:13
Whoops sorry. Amended to the correct IP (10.255.255.1). – databoy2k Mar 31 '11 at 3:24
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As @Shane suggests, 10.255.255.255 is a broadcast address, on a 10.0.0.0/8 network anyway, otherwise it is just meaningless.

Only 127.0.0.0/8 addresses are loopbacks, all others are unicast or broadcast addresses.

Once these issues are accounted for, if for some obscure reason you still want to connect to the PC's shares using more than one IP address, the PC must be set up with those addresses first. This is simple to do on most operating systems but has implications beyong the system itself: Either the router (aka gateway) on the subnet that the PC is connected to must have dual IP addresses for that subnet, a very unusual and unlikely scenario, or the PC itself must be setup to support VLANs which then requires the switch port to which it is connected, to support those VLANs, I suspect that both these setups are more complicated than you require.

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Ok. Yes both answers are far more complicated than I would have liked. All that I need is to make Windows shortcuts on the client machine that start with "//name" resolve automatically to 10.10.1.45 first, and if that is not valid, then to 10.255.255.1. – databoy2k Mar 31 '11 at 3:27
The short answer is no. It requires some 'intelligence' to decide which address to use and that can only be done with some code, not just with a shortcut. If it is not possible to properly set up the destination so that the primary system automatically fails over to the secondary then a short batch file/shell script could check for the existence of one system and connect or not depending on the result. – blankabout Apr 1 '11 at 6:07
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