Thread: the hosts of Windows

from a new user...


actually not for asking but
for sure...here all of friends know more about hosts

inside C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc...

anyone could give a short explaination why it's provided there?

thanks for respond

It is mainly used for backward compatibility with older versions of windows and other OSs. The netbios, which stores system names and ip addresses in Hosts file, was the only name resolution system supported in older days operating systems. Now a days we use DNS name resolution system, which is easy to maintain, and old netbios system also. So, windows use the file Hosts to store the hostname ip address mapping in traditional way for netbios name resolution, and the configured DNS server ip address in network properties for DNS name resolution. There is on WINS service for centralized netbios name resolution which avoids the use of hosts file. All these three methods basically do the same function ie. convert host name into ip address.