The origin of Rayleigh scattering in fiber waveguides is numerically demonstrated, which indicates that the inhomogeneous doping and diameter variations during drawing are the two dominant reasons. And the scattering fiber with a loss as high as 0.54 dB/km is successfully fabricated based on such principles. The overall Rayleigh backscattering intensity of 5 km scattering fiber is 5 dB higher than that of SMF-28 with the same length in telecommunication window. The principle of single-mode random fiber laser is also studied. The emission spectrum is the superposition of a large number of random modes with arbitrary amplitudes and phases, among which only the highest gain modes can lasing through gain competition. In experiment, a single-mode erbium-doped fiber linear laser with a narrow linewidth of 3.5 kHz and a high contrast of 50 dB is achieved by combining with 500 m scattering fiber as the random feedback. The threshold pump current is reduced by 80 mA and the max output power is increased by 3 dBm for the proposed laser compared with those of the laser with 500 m SMF-28 as the feedback. The tunabiltiy of the proposed laser is determined mainly by the fiber Bragg grating.