Ignore hosts file?

Question

I need to call a Response.Redirect method from C# but I need to do it in such a way that it ignores the Hosts file on windows for this call?

For example, if on Hosts I have:

127.0.0.1 google.com

and I call a Response.Redirect("google.com"), I need it to ignore the hosts just for this one call and actually go to google.com rather than localhost. How could I do this?

I know I could call a Response.Redirect on google's IP address but is there a better way?

Answer 1

The only to ignore the hosts file, is to delete it.

Answer 2

No, probably not: DNS lookup is handed over to your OS, which checks...hosts file.

Iff you can

• look up the IP address without the OS's resolver
• and the target server accepts IP address instead of hostname (some webservers will refuse to serve http://10.15.6.4/some/path (Google Search accepts an IP hostname and works, btw)),

then it might work.

Answer 3

If you can know the IP address of the host without asking the OS ( e.g. via 3rd party ) .. then you actually ignored the hosts files .