Somewhat Confused Question
Depending on the situation access to your ports can be local or remote. Usually local machines use loopback when connection to ports on the local machine. People think of remote connections as being a seperate location but that not entirely true. Heres a MySQL example:
my ip for this example: 192.168.0.1
If I wish to connect to mysql on my local machine I can connect from the command line
% mysql
this will be a local connection using loopback to port 3306
now I could also specify the host I wish to connect to
%mysql -h 192.168.0.1
this is now an external connection, which even though on the local machine it is not going through the loopback
If you want to test your FTP as a remote attacker make sure you specify the full ip, so not to use the loopback.