April Fools is right around the corner. This is the one time of year that you are "allowed" to play tircks on people. Try playing this little trick on a friend or enemies PC. This trick will make every web page that your friend frequently visits go to any other page of your choice. (got that ??) Microsoft's method of host name resolution is in the following order:

Localhost, Host, DNS, WINS, Broadcast, LMHost.
Easy to Remember: (Lets Have Dinner When Betty Leaves)

This means that your PC checks your local host file before sending its query to a DNS server to resolve an Internet address, or any host name for that matter. So if you edit the Host file on a "victims" computer with say, the an entry like this.

216.115.108.243 www.google.com
(this is yahoo.com's IP)

Everytime your friend tries to go to google.com he is directed to yahoo.com. Imagine the possiblities....... It is especially funny if your firend frequently visits different news sites, like msnbc.com, cnn.com, eyewitnessnews.com, you can jumble all of the Ip addresses and host names up so that he\she will go to all the wrong sites, driving them crazy.

Steps to Pulling It Off.
1. Find out what web sites your friend visits frequently. Either by looking at his history
directory or by just watching him.
2. Create a host file in notepad. Make sure that you save the file without any extention. Add
your entries to screw up all of the web pages.
3. Get control of his PC, either remotely or when he leaves his desk. (remotely may require a
little more work, if it is a NT\2000 machine, try to map a drive letter to his hidden share. If
Gixxer is his computer name, You would map \\Gixxer\c$)
4. Rename his\her current host file to something else to restore at a later time.
It is located in the c:\windows dir for win98 (I think);c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc folder
for NT\2000 (I think); do a find for host.
5. Copy your host file onto their PC, to the location above.
6. Sit back and wait for the laughs.

A word of warning though, Payback Is A Bitch.

Anyone else have an IT related April Fools Joke to Play?