How can I define the address that swank server should listen to?

Question

There is no argument for setting the address to bind to when starting swank server:

* (describe 'swank:create-server) 
=> ...
   Lambda-list: (&KEY (PORT DEFAULT-SERVER-PORT)
                (STYLE *COMMUNICATION-STYLE*) (DONT-CLOSE *DONT-CLOSE*)
                (CODING-SYSTEM *CODING-SYSTEM*))

...

How can I do it?

Often

Answer 1

Bind swank::*loopback-interface* to a string containing the ip address for the swank server. It defaults to the localhost ("127.0.0.1").

For security, take care that the swank address is not wide open to the world as it would leave the computer vulnerable for intrusion. If the goal is to access swank from another computer, it might be preferable to rather set up a secure channel to the swank server and leave the loopback-interface as is.

Luxury

I am already using ssh tunneling to access the server from laptop when I am on the internet, but at my home LAN, the desktop PC didnt have putty client setup with tunnels and I was lazy to do it then, so i thought I would just fire up swank on the LAN iface instead of filling the tunnel forwardings in putty :P . Thats what caused the question – Often

Of course this kind of laziness is dangerous because I am sure that if swank:create-server provided the argument for address I would have left it listening on 0.0.0.0 just to avoid configuring the desktop PC.... :))))) – Often

Swank offers optional authentication with a password in a ~/.slime-secret file. Step carefully though. – Luxury