"pointing it to 70.42.244.156 (ip of dish6.sling.com) and see if that works "
I tried that and it went directly to dish2.sling.com......
AH.. ok..
Just to cover for anyone that doesn't know ...
... The Hosts file on a PC (*nix too) can contain entries to map IP addresses to Host names. Normally you don't want to manually edit this, because DNS (Name resolution) takes care of converting the
www.whatever _dot_ com in to the IP addresses that computers use.
When you manually edit the hosts file .. you'd have something like this:
Code:
70.42.244.156 dish1.sling.com
70.42.244.156 dish2.sling.com
70.42.244.156 dish3.sling.com
70.42.244.156 dish4.sling.com
70.42.244.156 dish5.sling.com
70.42.244.156 dish6.sling.com
70.42.244.156 dish7.sling.com
70.42.244.156 dish8.sling.com
70.42.244.156 dish9.sling.com
70.42.244.156 dish10.sling.com
So ... when your browser goes to ask for "dish2" .... the DNS is skipped over, for the entry there in the hosts file ... in this case that IP address is what I get for dish6 ...
The whole point of doing this is to try to see if
- logins cross servers
- force a specific server to be used
- see if said server is able to render content properly, while another does not
Note that once you edit your hosts file, to make sure all is right with the browser, reboot the PC .. while they *should* be consulting this file, browsers tend to cache their own DNS entries, and until the browser's DNS cache dies, it might not attempt to grab from the hosts file.
Also note.. that while the Hosts file has the entries in such a form ... if you normally login and see
http://dish2 ... you *will still see* dish2 as the URL ... its just that behind the words ... DNS should be mapping the IP address that's in your HOSTS file..
To see if you are in fact making a connection to that IP .. you would open a command prompt and type:
netstat -an
and look for an IP address under the "Foreign Address" column of the one above (.156)
Anyone modifying your Hosts file should remember to back up a copy, and if you use tools like Spybot to fill your hosts file with entries to bad websites ... you definitely want to back up the file...
(note in Spybot's case, it creates address mappings as this: 127.0.0.1 some_bad_site dot com)
Personally I'm setting up to test now...