John Miller wrote:
You can do that if you like, but it makes little sense if you have a DNS server handy.
The hosts file is for (more-or less) permanently-assigned addresses. Yes, it's unneeded for dynamic (DHCP-assigned) addresses.
If you have 100 machines, and they all have permanently assigned IP addresses, are you saying you're going to stuff 100 lines of name to address mappings into each machines hosts file? If yes, then what do you think DNS is for?
With DNS, I make one change and I update every machines name to address mapping view of the local network.
Well, pre-DNS, for sure, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it a relic. It's just the ticket for those addresses that are nailed down. Many admins like to do that for some or all of their local machines. (Your own /etc/host.conf file still includes something like "order hosts bind," doesn't it?)
The concept of hosts came before DNS, and therefore it has a legacy foothold on systems. It had a real use as you suggest in the pre DNS days. Today, changing hosts files for name resolution is antiquated and the hosts.conf was augmented to specify bind as an additional mechanism; the preferred mechanism.
I dare say that DNS is the defacto name resolver database today, and that almost no one uses hosts to provide anything past resolving localhost which does indeed resolve to 127.0 type addresses and are unique per box. Therefore DNS can't resolve localhost and hence hosts is the only place to resolve it.
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