Creating new SSP with host headers

I've just spent several hours banging my head against the desk trying to set up a MOSS development environment, and not being able to access the newly created SSP. It has nothing to do with permissions (couldn't access with the account that was used to create the SSP), or having the SSP name the same as the App Pool name.

What was the issue was that I was being tricksy and using port 80 with all three of the sites (SSP Admin, MySite and Portal) and using host headers to identify them. Without any changes, this causes a 401.1 error because in Microsoft's words: "...the Web Site uses Integrated Authentication and has a name that's mapped to the local loopback address."

In the Microsoft KB article, there are two fixes, both involve editing the registry:

1. Specify host names in the BackConnectionHostNames multi-string value, or
2. Disable the loopback check.

The second one is easier if it's a dev environment, but the first is preferred if using NTLM authentication.