Another example of needing a custom ip address is at my company, I’ve needed to check the status of a printer and if I want to try the access it via its hostname http://printername it wont work because the SysAdmin has shared the printer on the network without adding a custom dns host name, even though it has a static IP address on the network. So I added the name of each printer to my hosts file so now I have no problem accessing any printer via its name, without having to first look up its IP address.

Also, if you intend to block a website by its hostname then this is also the solution for you.

You can find the hosts file in the following folder…
Windows 95, 98, and ME in the %WinDir%\ directory
NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7 in the %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\ directory (%SystemRoot% is almost always C:\Windows)
iPhone and iTouch in the /private/etc/hosts directory
Linux in the /etc/hosts directory

Also, a note for 0.1% of Windows NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, and Windows 7 users, the actual location may differ, to find the real location you’ll need to dig into the registry key, give the following a look up

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HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

and look for the following string key DataBasePath. On my computer it was declared as %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc I know that’s what I said it would be above, I just want all you SysAdmins to be aware of that 0.1% chance.

Lastly once, you finish making any modifications you’ll need to flush your locally cached DNS on your computer.

In WinXP you can edit the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file by opening it in notepad or any ascii text editor. By default the last line you’ll see is

127.0.0.1       localhost

but other programs can change this. The IP address 127.0.0.1 is always the ip address of the local computer. It doesn’t matter if the computer has a different IP address on the network, 127.0.0.1 is considered a loop back address, in other words, it always points to your computer.

you can add a new hostname followed by the ip address in the text file that’s it, it’s just that simple! Let’s add example.com to our local host names, now if we had apache installed, this ip address would always map to our computer just by adding the following line to the end of your hosts file…

127.0.0.1    example.com

Now what if you want to block a website like MySpace? Add the following line

0.0.0.0       myspace.com

The problem with this approach is it only blocks the hostname myspace.com, it leaves www.myspace.com and login.myspace.com completely accessible, and other hostname that I don’t know about (or worse yet, any future host names that they decide to add). So let’s block all we we can by pointing them to a null IP address

0.0.0.0       myspace.com
0.0.0.0       www.myspace.com
0.0.0.0       login.myspace.com

Ok great, I added my login.myspace.com to the hosts file, but I can still access it, what gives?!? There is two possible fixes for this solution. First close all of your browsers, for example, if you can still access the domain in Internet Explorer or FireFox it’s because the IP address has been cached, close the browser so that the browser can "forget" the IP address. Now before you reopen the application we also need to clear the DNS entry from Windows. We can clear a DNS entry from windows by clicking Start, Run typing ipconfig /flushdns then clicking ok. This will flush the ip address address stored by the operating system. You should now by able to open FireFox and Internet Explorer and verify that they no longer have the IP address cached.

After running the following registry script on my machine, I can get a verbose output.

There are two ways to set this in the registry, Option 1

1. Open the registry by clicking start, run, typing regedit.exe then clicking ok.
2. Navigate to the following subkey

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system

3. Right click to create a new "DWORD Value"
4. Title the new DWORD key VerboseStatus
5. Double click VerboseStatus and make sure it has a "Value data" of 1
6. Close the registry, you’re done.

Windows Registry Editor for Verbose Output

Option 2 to create this setting is by copying and pasting the following code into a registry file called VerboseOutput.reg.

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Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system]
"VerboseStatus"=dword:00000001

This registry hack can be applied to the following Microsoft boxes…

• Microsoft Windows XP Professional
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Edition
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition for Itanium-Based Systems
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition for Itanium-based Systems
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (32-bit x86)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition (32-bit x86)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition (32-bit x86)
• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition
• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition