The “route print” command in Windows will show you some “On-link” entries in the gateway column. This is from Windows Vista and up. Before that, you would see “127.0.0.1”.
While creating Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, Microsoft built a “Next Generation TCP/IP Stack” (Wikipedia link) that – apart from adding IPv6 – added many new features and performance improvements.
Since traffic routable through the local machine can have multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, it is not called ” 127.0.0.1″ any more, but “On-link” as the answers to the windows 7 – What does “On-link” mean on the result of “rout print” command? on SuperUser nicely point out:
They are addresses that can be resolved locally. They don’t need a gateway because they dont need to be routed.
and this:
Yep, the other three answers are correct: it’s just a route thats directly reachable the NIC is in direct contact with it; on the same subnet. To explain a little further though: by contrast, the routes that have a gateway IP listed must be contacted through that gateway.
Note that sometimes the new TCP/IP stack needs some arm wrestling in order to have it do what you want (for instance to have it honour TCP metrics).
Note that the “default gateway” line is also missing, as it is in the 0.0.0.0 network destination.
A few examples of what route print shows: Read the rest of this entry »
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