I have some accesses from 192.168.0.71 on my apache logs. I looked up this IP (because my server almost exclusively takes requests from 127.0.0.1, and I saw that it's reserved for "special purposes." What types of purposes might those be?
Edit:
I didn't tell you, typing 192.168.0.71 brings me straight to my site, just as 127.0.0.1 would. I just wonder how this is different, then from 127.0.0.1.
192.168.0.71 (Well the entire range 192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255) are for private (read. not internet accessible) network IP addresses, so that is from something inside your private network.
I believe it is reserved for any private intranet, as per this document.
RFC 1918 reserves addresses starting with 192.168 for private networks. This most likely means that some computer on your local network is accessing the server.
The 192.168.x.y block is typically used for non-Internet connected devices. It's most likely from one of your own machines. If you have a router of some sort, go into its configuration tool and see if you can find the block of addresses it uses to assign to internal machines. It should be 192.168.x.y.
192.168.???.??? is a special, reserved range of addresses private IP addresses. So it's probably a computer from your local network.
Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classful_network
EDIT: You've edited your post.
It seems, it's your address in the local network. 127.0.0.1 is the loopback address.
Difference between them is if somebody else from your network types 192.168.0.71, they go to your site, 127.0.0.1 is for their computer.
I didn't tell you, typing 192.168.0.71 brings me straight to my site, just as 127.0.0.1 >would. I just wonder how this is different, then from 127.0.0.1.
That means that 192.168.0.71 is the assigned internal IP to your machine.
127.0.0.1 is just a local loopback redirect. 192.168.0.71 is actually directly connecting to your machine.
The 192.168.0.0 network is defined as being one of the "private" networks. As Krzysiek Goj has said, check this link for further details.
There are 3 ranges that have been designated as private ip addresses. - 10.0.0.0/8 (meaning 10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255) - 172.16.0.0/12 (meaning 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255) - 192.168.0.0/16 (meaning 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255)
Typically a DHCP server on your network (of which most network switches are examples) are configured to dynamically hand out ip addresses in one of the private ranges. The 192.168.0.0/16 range is probably the most popular. Alternatively you may have been statically allocated one of these addresses by your network administrator.
To check the address that you've been allocated you can use one of the following: - (windows) ipconfig /all - (unix) ifconfig
By default your machine will also have a loopback interface enabled using the address 127.0.0.1. This can be used to access your own machine.
Judging from your edit, it sounds like 192.168.0.71 is your computer's IP address on your internal network.
As to why it's showing up in your logs instead of 127.0.0.1... well, I can only assume that, for whatever reason, one of the programs on your computer is contacting the computer by its network IP rather than the localhost IP.
There is not enough information here to completely answer the question. The most likely answer is:
The web server is also your desktop system. Your browser is running on that system as well, so the the 127.0.0.1 traffic is from your surfing of your own site.
The 192.168.0.71 is the actual IP address of your desktop, which is connected to some kind of NAT'ing device which connects you to the internet. Almost every broadband WiFi device uses this subnet by default.
The reason some traffic comes from that address is that on occasion, for various web reasons, some of the traffic is directly addressing your 192.168.0.71 address rather than the 127.0.0.1 address.