ifconfig and interfaces [closed]

just a question for my understanding. on my mac when I use ifconfig command on my mac I get the following interfaces:

• en0
• en1
• lo0
• fw0
• vment0
• vment1

I don't understand why there are so many. I understand that eth0 would be for LAN connections, and that en0 is the wireless connection. But macbook only has one airport..so why en1 as well? not sure what vments are for either.

There's no eth0 on default configuration of OS X. By default, en0 and en1 are your physical network connections (wired and wireless LAN). lo0 is the loopback interface. fw0 is the IP over Firewire interface; and vmnet interfaces are installed by VMware for network communication with virtual machines.

en0 and en1 are your physical wired/wireless cards.

lo0 is the loopback device, which is used for entirely internal communication, ie. between two applications both running on your PC.

fw0 is for networking over firewire I believe.

vment* - is used by VMWare Fusion to provide networking to your virtual machines, and there's likely to be one per VM you have set up.