~/.hosts patch

[Peter Ross]

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006, Brooks Davis wrote:

> It's useful for cases where you want to add shortcuts to hosts as a user

.. and to confuse the admin who is later called by the user who cannot 
figure out why he cannot connect to a machine added to DNS just recently.. 
only because the user added a "convenient" shortcut with the same 
name several months ago.

If the user wants a shortcut he can add a variable. It does not overwrite 
DNS (or wherever your host names come from) names.

If you are able to hack your way into a machine you can write this file 
so later attempts to connect to a remote machine can be redirected (e.g. 
useful to get login passwords) - you do not need root access to achieve 
it.

I guess there are more ideas for a mischievious mind..

I do not like to administrate a machine with such obscure features. If I 
want a machine configured by ordinary users, spyware, viruses and other 
stuff so it behaves weird or badly : I can get it anytime from 
Microsoft;-)

Regards
Peter