On a Mac, in what other file can hosts be set, other than in /etc/hosts?

Question

I have an annoying problem, where one specific URL keeps pointing locally to 127.0.0.1, no matter if I have it refer to a different IP address in my /etc/hosts file. I used to use Gas Mask, but found it to be buggy and removed it - hopefully it cleaned up after itself.

Are there other files that grab any IP redirection before getting to the hosts file? Or is there a way that I can follow the exact path a URL request does?

Answer 1

This isn't a programming question and you might get better answers if you ask the super users and sys admins who hang out on http://serverfault.com , but enough people do programming pointing to "localhost" that it might be worthwhile to answer here.

Besides editing the hosts file, you also have to flush the dnscache. EG type " dscacheutil -flushcache ".

More instructions can be found here .

Also you'll need to restart the " mDNSResponder " process. Details on that can be found in this related question