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The hosts file is one of several system facilities that assists in addressing network nodes in a computer network. It is a common part of an operating system's Internet Protocol (IP) implementation, and serves the function of translating human-friendly hostnames into numeric protocol addresses, called IP addresses, that identify and locate a host in an IP network.
IP address blocking is possible on many systems using a hosts file, which is a simple text file containing hostnames and IP addresses. Hosts files are used by many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Android, and OS X.
If you are looking for a simple, general mechanism for the local specification of IP addresses for specific hostnames (server names), use the HOSTS file, not the LMHOSTS file. The file, if it exists, is read as the LMHOSTS setting file. A sample file (lmhosts.sam) is provided. It contains documentation for manually configuring the file.
The IP address of a public server is also important, similar in global uniqueness to a postal address or telephone number. Both IP address and port number must be correctly known by all hosts wishing to successfully communicate. Private IP addresses as described in RFC 1918 are usable only on private networks not directly connected to the internet.
The DNS is used for efficient storage and distribution of IP addresses of block-listed email hosts. A common method is to place the IP address of the subject host into the sub-domain of a higher level domain name, and to resolve that name to a record that indicates a positive or a negative indication. For example:
This is usually a combination of the host's local name with its parent domain's name. For example, en.wikipedia.org consists of a local hostname (en) and the domain name wikipedia.org. This kind of hostname is translated into an IP address via the local hosts file, or the DNS resolver.
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The address 127.0.0.1 is the standard address for IPv4 loopback traffic; the rest are not supported by all operating systems. However, they can be used to set up multiple server applications on the host, all listening on the same port number. In the IPv6 addressing architecture [3] there is only a single address assigned for loopback: ::1. The ...