Ubuntu host keeps changing IP, having to constantly reconfigure hosts file for localhost access

Question

My current development environment is Ubuntu 10.04 64bit host and Windows 7 64bit guest and guest is NAT connected. I use Ubuntu as a host because I feel at home but I needed some Windows only software so I installed it as guest.

I use Dreamweaver on the guest and my LAMP stack and the PHP files on Ubuntu and I shared the folder with Windows. On Ubuntu I added example.com to the /etc/hosts file so I can test it with its own URL.

On Windows if I hit example.com it doesn't go to my local test site but instead to the online site. I added the System32/etc/hosts file to my host OS IP so that it works seamlessly but the host's IP keeps changing so I have to reconfigure every time.

Is there a better solution?

Answer 1

• Static IP address on the Ubuntu host.
• DNS server (dnsmasq or bind9) in the host.
• Local name resolution - either Windows NetBIOS with Samba, or mDNS with Avahi/Bonjour. (You will have to configure a second virtual host, example or example.local, in Apache.)