dns

Why on earth would you want to do this? For a very specific use case.Read more

1. You do development of a web application locally that needs a wildcard domain name. ie: where you want 192.168.1.1 to answer any http request for *.example.com ( example.com, www.example.com, blah.example.com, ridiculously.long.example.com) without specifically configuring each name in a hosts file.
2. You have previously setup your workstation to use Google's public DNS and don't want to lose the benefits by setting up your own nameserver ( Also applies if you forward^? to ANY upstream DNS servers, just swap^? the Google IP's out with the ones you want.)
3. You are using Windows XP (This should work on Vista). You can apply the same configuration files here for any version of BIND. ( OSX Users should look at a utility called DNSEnabler that provides a dead simple graphical user interface to manipulate BIND on OSX ), but the instructions steps here are specific to Windows.