[mianosm]

That makes no sense what so ever.

Pinging your loopback address just shows that your localhost is still there.

If you were to write a script that instead pulled the local IPv4 address you are getting - that might be a little more sensical?

[gcr]

On Linux, that packet wouldn't leave the device either. You have to ping another host on your subnet or the kernel won't queue the packet for transmission on a hardware network interface.