Windows Server,  Windows XP

Edit Windows Hosts File

Pretty much every operating system has a hosts file. In that file, you can define a hostname and then set a target IP. In Windows, that file is called hosts.txt and located in %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\.

By default, that %systemroot% is going to be C:\Windows. This makes the path to the file C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.txt.

By default, you’ll see the following:

127.0.0.1 localhost loopback
::1 localhost

When you edit the file, add a new line with the IP address then a tab then the hostname that you’d like to be able to ping to get the address in question. For example, to add server.krypted.com to point to 192.168.210.210, you’d add some lines to make it look as follows:

127.0.0.1 localhost loopback
::1 localhost
192.168.210.210 server.krypted.com

Then save and try pinging the host:

ping server.krypted.com