So I had to configure a sharepoint server access on macos and it was not able to resolve the host name. I know how to do this in windows using lmhosts.sam but I didn’t know how the Mac would handle such task. So I went digging and these are my findings:
1. Edit private/etc/hosts and include your host (I used vi) . For example:
### Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.##
127.0.0.1 localhost255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
192.168.0.5 myserver
DO NOT CHANGE the localhost and broadcasthost settings.
2. Test it using PING
$ ping myserver
And at this point everything should be working. If not please verify your host definition (step 1). If everything’s ok try to reboot in case the new settings are not being loaded.
This was only tested on MacOS X 10.5.5 and you must have root permissions to accomplish the task as the hosts file is read only for non root users.