I do a lot of local web development on my MacBook Pro. Frequently I had multiple tiers of servers running – a Jetty instance running the web tier and a JBoss/EJB server doing the business tier behind it. The problem is JBoss opens up so many ports on a particular network adapter and trying to get JBoss and Jetty to share a single IP is a nightmare. So the easier way is to just create a new IP or alias your localhost (127.0.0.1) into something like 127.0.0.2. When you start up Jetty, you pass in the binding IP of .2 and then JBoss and Jetty place nice with each other.
The Mac OS command (at least 10.6) to create an alias is:
ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.2
and to delete:
ifconfig lo0 -alias 127.0.0.2
This is not persistent – the alias will not survive a reboot. I don’t need the alias often even to require it to be permanent. If you’re curious how to keep it permanent, let me know and I’ll post that. This is the hacker way to do it on the command line. There is a much easier way to do it through the GUI but this way doesn’t stick around on the reboot, which is one of my requirements for my project – no retaining traces. 🙂