6
/etc/hosts lets you set system-wide hostname lookups. Is there a place in OS X to set per-user hostnames?
I use two user accounts on my laptop and I'd like to override IP addresses for just one of those accounts. Is that possible?
Matt S
Posted 2014-11-26T19:22:31.167
Reputation: 372
6
No, DNS is global.
You don't mention any details.
You could redefine:
thissite.com 0.0.0.0
mythissite.com 122.122.122.122 <-- with the IP address of the real site.
Then only people who know that thissite.com is broken and to use mythissinte.com instead would be able to access thissite.com
Dianne
Posted 2014-11-26T19:22:31.167
Reputation: 206
2As a note this will only work if the site you are masking with a new domain name is listening on that domain, otherwise it may say "nope! I don't know who mythissite.com is!" And return a 404 error – Mark Henderson – 2014-11-26T22:03:19.553
1To further clarify what Mark is saying, if a server is using Apache virtual hosts the setup is not really IP address based but rather hostname based. When I setup Apache servers I specifically "dead end" direct IP address calls to a blank page. Only valid host names as well as configs on the Apache sever will result in real content being returned. – JakeGould – 2014-11-27T07:37:38.783
2
There is no such thing in any operating system, but you can swap /etc/hosts file by some script when user is logging in.
I don't know much about OS X, you may have to restart one or more network services after that file swap.
You also might want to change permissions or owner on /etc/hosts file, if your script will be running from non-administrator account.
Kamil
Posted 2014-11-26T19:22:31.167
Reputation: 2 524
Pretty sure ubuntu has a ~/.hosts – wTyeRogers – 2018-12-21T22:42:29.910
@Tetsujin this is incorrect. Yosemite or any older versions of OSX, as well as any Linux and FreeBSD distributions that I know of, works with /etc/hosts. – Umur Kontacı – 2014-11-27T03:43:40.047
@Tetsujin first page of your google search result not confirming your claim and contain question about hosts file
– Ivan Solntsev – 2014-11-27T09:33:19.690