Some Mac users have discovered that the hosts file in MacOS does not appear to work, or changes to the /etc/hosts file on the Mac are seemingly ignored. Given that the hosts file is used to map IP addresses to host names, and is frequently modified by advanced users, this is an understandably annoying problem. … Read More
Many advanced users often need to find and list all hosts on a network, often for IP discovery, connecting to a remote machine, or some other system administration or network admin purpose. One of the easiest ways to find all hosts and the host IP addresses on a network is by using the nmap command … Read More
The Mac hosts file is a system level file located at /etc/hosts which maps IP addresses to host names for Mac OS X networking. Many users edit and modify the hosts file so that they can point a domain to a different IP address, whether for the purpose of local development, blocking sites, or simply … Read More
The hosts file is included on every computer and used by Mac OS to map IP addresses to host names. Because users may choose to adjust, change, or otherwise edit the hosts file for a variety of reasons, it can be easily subjected to user error, leading to a variety of undesirable network problems ranging … Read More
Need to edit or modify the hosts file on a Mac? This guide will show you exactly how to edit the hosts file in Mac OS. You’ll find hosts in Mac OS X is stored at /private/etc/hosts but it can also be accessed at the more traditional location of /etc/hosts. That said, if you’re looking … Read More
The hosts file maps hostnames to IP addresses, it’s present in virtually every OS in some form or another and in Mac OS X it’s stored at /etc/hosts, which requires administrative privileges to modify and generally a jump to the command line. Editing the hosts file allows you to do a variety of things like … Read More
Gas Mask is a simple hosts file manager that sits in your menubar and allows you to easily edit and switch between multiple hosts files. With support for syntax highlighting, Growl, and hotkey hosts switching, it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to deal with multiple hosts files on a Mac. Gas Mask is … Read More
If you’re a web developer you probably do a fair amount of development on your local machine using either the built-in Mac OS X Apache server or, in my case, something like MAMP. Because a local web server like this is really handy for testing this, you can make your local development life a bit … Read More
We’ve received several questions asking how to block specific sites from being accessed directly on the Mac. The frustration seems to lie in how easy it is to circumvent the typical measures, such as setting Parental Controls and blocking sites in Safari, only to have them accessed in Camino or Firefox. Well, a quick and … Read More
