The hosts file in Windows can be used to override DNS look-ups. I have described one practical use for webmasters who want to work on sites before DNS propagation. The hosts file is used by many for ad blocking, blocking of hosts that may be malicious or dangerous or speeding up connections to select sites [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

The Windows hosts file is used to map hostnames to IP addresses forcing the computer to use that mapping instead of the one provided by the DNS server. This can be useful in several situations like speeding up Internet surfing or making sure that a website is working fine after moving it to another Internet [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

My last article described how to “Quickly install Nagios on Ubunut“. That article had you up and running with the powerful open source network monitoring tool, but not much more. If you really want to make Nagios useful you have to do a bit of work. Some might see this work as too time consuming [...]

Categories: Advice, Linux, Networks, Open Source, Security, Software, Tutorials Advanced, Tutorials Basic

If you buy a website or order a new domain you sometimes want to point it to another web hoster or your own virtual or dedicated server. Most webmasters do this by changing the DNS servers to point to the new server or by pointing the existing DNS servers to a IP. The phase that [...]

Categories: Web Development

How many times have you gone to your Linux box to administer your network and found yourself developing carpal tunnel from typing ssh -v -l jlwallen 192.168.1.10 -X? Or how taxing to your memory is it when you have to remember an IP address assigned to that Linux file server that never needs babysitting save [...]

Categories: Linux, Open Source, Tutorials Basic