Does Windows Even Use the Hosts File Any More?

[Gerowen]

For as long as I've been using them Unix operating systems have always had a file, /etc/hosts, that was basically a way to locally set DNS entries by hand. It's handy because if you want to control access to certain websites or resources without employing a whole server dedicated to that task, you could just redirect url.com to 127.0.0.1 which would of course not work. Later I found out that Microsoft had implemented this idea into their Windows OSs in the form of the file C:\Windows\Sytem32\drivers\etc\hosts which looks and operates pretty much identically. However one time in an attempt to block access to certain sites on a Windows Vista machine I tried modifying this file to point certain sites to the loopback. When trying to visit those sites however it was like Windows was completely ignoring the hosts file. My question is, does Windows even use this file any more? And if so, what was I doing wrong? (Now that I wrote this I probably could have just flushed the DNS and tried, off to experiment in my XP virtual machine).

[Raa]

Yes, it does.

Except if it's using a proxy.

[primexx]

did you go back and verify that the file was actually written to?

[+BudMan MVC]

Hmmm what IE does is going to depend on a few things -- If fairly sure its still going to try and resolve dns locally, it does not ask the proxy to do the dns.. LIke you set with firefox

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.proxy.socks_remote_dns

And its going to have to be a socks proxy as well btw.. Easy enough to test, just set IE to use a proxy and then fire up wireshark to watch your dns traffic.

But yes the host file is used.