If you are dissatisfied with a particular DNS entry or set of DNS entries, you can change them for yourself (at least, you can change it on the computers you have root/administrator access on). Every TCP/IP implementation that supports DNS that I have ever heard of has a hosts file (under Linux,/etc/hosts, surprise, surprise). Before your TCP/IP stack goes and asks the local DNS server what the IP address for a particular name is, it checks in the hosts file. Usually, hosts files are used in networks that don't have DNS servers, but, you can make any entries you want in your own hosts file. As a matter of fact, this can provide big performance benefits if your local DNS server is overloaded (not a single network packet needs to be sent to resolve a hostname in the hosts file), so "shadowing" real DNS entries could be useful as well (at the cost of automatic updates if the site moves). Thus, if you REALLY want www.microsoft.com to point to 206.132.41.231 (one of RedHat's webservers), you can make the entry in your hosts file and your system will be fooled. -Iota (Thomas Wenisch)
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If you are dissatisfied with a particular DNS entry or set of DNS entries, you can change them for yourself (at least, you can change it on the computers you have root/administrator access on). Every TCP/IP implementation that supports DNS that I have ever heard of has a hosts file (under Linux, /etc/hosts, surprise, surprise). Before your TCP/IP stack goes and asks the local DNS server what the IP address for a particular name is, it checks in the hosts file. Usually, hosts files are used in networks that don't have DNS servers, but, you can make any entries you want in your own hosts file. As a matter of fact, this can provide big performance benefits if your local DNS server is overloaded (not a single network packet needs to be sent to resolve a hostname in the hosts file), so "shadowing" real DNS entries could be useful as well (at the cost of automatic updates if the site moves). Thus, if you REALLY want www.microsoft.com to point to 206.132.41.231 (one of RedHat's webservers), you can make the entry in your hosts file and your system will be fooled. -Iota (Thomas Wenisch)