I have a local (HTTP) server running on my (Linux) machine (listening on 127.0.0.1:port) and a local application that connects to it as a client. Both the server and client applications are proprietary and I can only change some basic config for both. I have had this set up working fine until recently when the client application was updated. The client application now seems to require that the server it connects to must be "on the internet" so it is disallowing connections to 127.0.0.1 and other "local-like" addresses such as 10.0.*.* and 192.168.*.*.
As a workaround, I am now using ngrok to get a remote address for my local server and the client application happily works with that. However, that is a manual/slow process to run ngrok and update the client application's config and it requires an internet connection and going through ngrok's servers.
I am wondering if there is a way to "fake" an "internet-like" IP address to resolve directly to my local machine.
I have looked into "dynamic DNS" solutions but they require changes to router config that I often don't have control over.
What I am thinking is along the lines of setting some porn site's "internet-like" IP to "resolve" to my local machine on my local machine using some kind of "virtual network adapter" BUT I don't want to spend a lot of time building such a set up. Hence, the question, is there an EASY way to do this?
ip address add 31.192.120.36/31 dev lo
and the client application doesn't like the that either. Could it be checking the local ip config?