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I'm looking for a way to override DNS entries in Firefox, for development/testing purposes. I know the normal way to do this is via the hosts file, but I cannot edit it since I don't have admin access on my work machine. Does anyone know of a browser plugin/addon which would do this for me?

I did find the SwitchHosts add-on, although it also requires admin rights in order to install itself.

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Sep 4 '10 at 12:25

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up vote 7 down vote

One possibility is to have a socks 5 server on a machine that you have administrative control on, set up this machine as your socks proxy in firefox, and change network.proxy.socks_remote_dns in about:config to true. In theory, all DNS lookups should be done through the proxy, so you should be able to supply your own IP addresses.

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True that would work, although I was hoping for something a bit simpler.. Also a disadvantage to this method is that I wouldn't be able to change DNS entries on the fly. – John J. Camilleri Sep 2 '10 at 14:13
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@John, the "something a bit simpler" might be to talk to your boss to get admin privileges on your development box. This DNS issue is a very good example of why you need that, if you'd ask me! – Arjan Sep 4 '10 at 12:38
up vote 5 down vote

Fiddler has such an option: Tools->hosts

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Thanks, but unfortunately I'm not able to install it on my machine either... – John J. Camilleri Sep 2 '10 at 12:26
up vote 2 down vote

If it's just for a few specific requests: the Live HTTP Headers allows for editing HTTP headers and then re-playing the request.

(For other options see also Send Host header when accessing IP address in Firefox on Stack Overflow.)

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Thanks for the link to the other topic. – 0xC0000022L Apr 25 '11 at 0:49
up vote 1 down vote

There are many plug-ins which can change the hosts file:

but they all need write access to the hosts file.

I wonder, why it is not possible to edit the browsers DNS-cache. My use-case: Seeing the local version of a page in one browser and the online version in another browser.

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