Network interface card required for xAP.

[Kevin Hawkins]

I have just witnessed a very arduous exchange of 'support' that has taken
place on the xPL list when an unfortunate new user was trying to get xPL
set
up and running. His problem turned out to be that he had no network card
installed - and hadn't appreciated this was a mandatory requirement. I have
to sympathise as this is not stated anywhere for either xPL or xAP. We
would
probably have taken just as long to pinpoint the problem. I can also see
that for a single PC this is an unfortunate requirement.

So - an obvious question - is there a way of creating a network loopback
operation on a standard (no NIC) PC with W98 upwards that would be workable
- and is there any benefit here of the use of the loopback interface
127.0.0.1 rather than a real interface address... I think for xAP we may
implement this slightly differently to xPL which may help.

Does the Ethernet loopback interface work without a NIC card present ?? -
and our hubs ??

Kevin