Amazing technical find for the day

My router is set up to forward some ports (e.g. 80) to my Linux box, which runs my web server, ftp server, etc. Annoyingly, it only forwards packets that come from outside-- if I connect to http://steak.place.org/ from the local net, it connects me to the router's set-up screen. I can connect to the Linux box directly using 192.168.1.21, of course, but when I visit pages with embedded images hosted at steak.place.org, the images are missing because the hostname resolves to the router itself. This is really annoying.

Eventually I realized that I could just add a line to /etc/hosts on my Linux box to force steak.place.org to always resolve to 192.168.1.21. This works great, if I'm browsing on the Linux box, but usually I'm browsing from my Windows box. Well, today, on a whim, I did a Google search for "/etc/hosts Windows 2000" and found an article explaining that yes, Windows has the exact equivalent of Unix's /etc/hosts. It's \system32\drivers\etc\hosts, and it's just a plain text file, with the same syntax as Unix. I added a line to the top, restarted Opera, and voila! (No, not Viola.) I can see embedded images on my own system! Huzzah!

It's amazing what useful little backdoors have been left around for those who need them. I wonder what other W2k tech tips I'm missing...