Categories
General

Forcing an IP Address

In the “real” world you simply add an entry to /etc/hosts like

1.2.3.4 myhost

The Mac OS X world is different. For version 10.5 and later you do the following

# Create the mapping
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/x.y.z IPAddress 127.0.0.1
# flush the cache
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

# Show the mappings
sudo dscl localhost -readall /Local/Default/Hosts

# Delete a mapping
sudo dscl localhost -delete /Local/Default/Hosts/x.y.z
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

3 replies on “Forcing an IP Address”

adding to hosts works fine for me on 10.6.6

It did change somewhere – I have some irritating sites mapped to 0.0.0.0 in my /etc/hosts. That used to send them nowhere, but now it’s sending them to localhost. But the local /etc/hosts file is still consulting. If I ping anything that’s in my hosts file, the ping goes to the IP from the hosts file, not the true IP.