Question

I’ve got a local Apache2 server on Ubuntu 12.04
with virtual hosts, so in the ‘hosts’ file I pointed
the virtualhost name to the local IP address -192.168.1.33-.

So ‘http://mySite.local’ points to ‘192.168.1.33’, it works fine
in the browser.

Now I want to test the same in a cellphone connected to the machine
through a wlan-adhoc network created in my notebook with shared connection.

I can see the root folder if I access to ‘192.168.1.33’ correctly,
but not if I access to ‘http://mySite.local’

I assume the ‘/etc/hosts’ file is not affecting the traffic through the adhoc network.
is this correct? Can I change this behaviour? is possible?

Answer 1

You are correct to assume that the hosts file only affects connections that originate from the machine to which the host file belongs. Other traffic already needs to know the IP address it will need to connect to before it reaches your machine. Depending on how much access you have to your phone, getting it to recognize your own domain name like this maybe more work than it’s worth.

I say this because you would need to do one of the following:

• Edit the equivalent of the hosts file on your phone (if such a file exists in an accessible way)

OR

• Set up a local DNS server to serve this info to your phone AND get your phone to use it for DNS resolution.

Without knowing what phone you have, I can’t say for sure how hard either of these will be. But I would guess neither one is going to be nearly as easy as typing in the IP and bookmarking it in your phones browser.