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?
No. That's an inference that you own.
I dare say that DNS is the defacto name resolver database today,
I agree completely, but...
and that almost no one uses hosts to provide anything past resolving localhost
...if you are unable to think of any 2005 scenarios in which it would be good to have a few entries in /etc/hosts, you might want to think on it a bit more.
