Hi, What would be the simplest way to have our windows XP workstations resolve an external host name to an IP that we specify? One of our hostnames is an application server that is central to our business, call it SVR1. SVR1 is co-located and resides outside of our data center and we must get to it via our internet connection. Ideally, our workstations would refer to SVR1 just by hostname "SVR1". We want to resolve the IP at the DNC (or some other central location). If we move to a different co-location provider, we would change the IP at this central location. We have changed the hosts file on the DNC server. The DNC server can ping SVR1 by hostname. However, the workstations still cannot even after rebooting them. Any suggestions?

You're asking about XP connectivity in a Windows 7 forum, and the solution had to do with server DNS! But since you asked nicely - you need to add a host record with the external server's address and name to your DNS service, that way, if you move the provider later all you need to do is change the host record's address to reflect the change. (I'm also hoping that DNC in your post should have been DNS and doesn't mean Democratic National Committee or Direct Numerical Control or some such.)