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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

In particular, manually editing the hosts file was a mostly-obsolete practice by the time the first version of Windows shipped, and certainly by the time Windows actually had a built-in networking stack. And it was always a red flag for a local app to mess with the hosts file.

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Obsolete? My team has an onboard document that spells out lines that needed to be add to host file so they can access internal resources. These are machines directly bought/rented and maintained by the team, so we prefer to use host files instead of going through the company DNS, which is maintained by an entirely different team.

The person you replied to said mostly-obsolete. They were speaking in the same context as the earlier commenter claiming it's a normal practice because everyone used to have to update their hosts files all the time before DNS existed at all.

Your shadow IT example is perfectly valid, and also isn't a 1:1 comparison with a company doing it automatically for a much larger number of external users.

Your post reminded me when Yahoo IM updated their chat protocol to an incompatible version with a gradual rollout! Half their eight servers used v1 and half v2. A v1 only client would connect half the time depending on which server the round-robin DNS sent you to. This took me forever to figure out, but the fix was to put the IP address of the four v1 servers in the hosts file. (Until the client updated its support for v2.)

That's dysfunctional enough to qualify as "obsolete" in my book.

You should get the company DNS to delegate a subdomain at my-team.example.com to you and then have an authoritative DNS server for it.

> manually editing the hosts file was a mostly-obsolete practice by the time the first version of Windows shipped

This claim strikes me as obviously wrong.

Yeah, I've had to manually edit hosts for every work and personal windows machine I've had in the last 20 years, I think. At least desktops.

Particularly since the first version of Windows shipped in what -1985? Contemporary with 4.2BSD? Did 4.2BSD even use /etc/hosts the same way or DNS?

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