Re: OT: ZBB

Wow.  Whole lotta unfamiliarity with hosts lookup going around, I see. :)

So the domain expired and someone else snapped it up?  Telling people
to add entries manually to their hosts file is not exactly a long-term
solution. :)

On any variety of UNIX going back to the dark ages, up to and
including Linux, the name-to-address mapping file lives in /etc/hosts.
 For this reason, Microsoft  included a TCP/IP stack in Windows NT,
the directory they put it in is also "etc", just buried a little
deeper under C:\WINDOWS.  However, the versions of Windows that
predate the merge with NT just have the hosts file in C:\WINDOWS
directly.  So you're not out of luck on '98 (or even '95) - just put
the lines in C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS.  (There should be a sample file -
C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS.SAM - that you can look at).

However, modern Unixes have a variety of other places to stick this
stuff in, and may not be paying attention to /etc/hosts at all.  On
Linux and many other modern versions of Unix, there's a file called
/etc/nsswitch.conf that tells them where to look.  Make sure that
"files" is one of the words after "hosts:" in that file.

Mac OS uses something called NetInfo; after changing /etc/hosts, be
sure to run this command in a Terminal window:

sudo niload hosts . </etc/hosts

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