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Linux Host File Explained

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Alright, so I just had to restart Firefox here. This is the default server page, the route page for my server, if were gonna “server.pointingbracket.net” and actually get the exact same page, and so what I can do I believe is access the routes on the server as normal and it works. So, what we’re doing as you can see is we’re just, we’re just setting DNS records internally for this machine that it looks at before it goes at you the correct DNS information. So, again I’m gonna go to network-tools. We’re going to try with like, let’s try and find Joe’s Pizza, a
website for them, there we go. So let’s see if this works. This is the IP address I’m getting. So, I’m going to check if that IP address will route to the website as well. No, but it routes to this page. This is the page we should see after we paste this in to our hosts file. Let’s go ahead and save, and then let’s go to “go/” Close this, and there we go. And you can see how this works is basically it routes to whatever we want to route to. So, you could create shortcuts for your favorite websites with the exception of Google, Google does a lot of internal routing and stuff. Sometimes this will work, sometimes it wont. It all depends on how the web server is setup. Usually though I just use the hosts file to set domains to go to my localhost, and that’s for when I’m developing something that a URL needs to be set with. So, if I’m developing a WordPress site on my local machine and I need to set up a URL in the WordPress configuration, I would configure a domain and then point it to my localhost. So, that is the hosts file. Let’s exit out of here, close this, clear that. So, now our hostname. A hostname is basically a name of a machine, and in this instance ours is called Voltron and we can see that because we’ve got this right here. So, you can use the hostname much like the same way you can use you know custom hosts that you set, so I can just go to Voltron and its gonna route to my Apache default page. Now, you can also update the hostname and we need to do a couple things in order to do that. So, first we’re gonna run the command “sudo hostnamectl set-hostname and whatever host we want to name it to. So, “Megazord” Now we need to edit the hosts file to update our host name here as well. So, we’re going to replace “Voltron” with “Megazord” and save this and close it, and we’re gonna run “sudo service hostname restart” It said it failed to restart the hostname service, but it looks like it’s working hostname is now set to Megazord, and if I were to close the browser and reopen it I should be able to go to Megazord/ and it does in fact redirect me to my default Apache 2 page. And so that’s what a host name is and how to change it on Ubuntu, you can also change it through the system settings but we’re not going to go through a GUI way to do this right now. So, thanks for watching I hope you guys found this informative. If you have any questions just leave a comment, otherwise I’ll see you guys soon.