In reference to the recent change in Internet Protocol (IP) address for SurvivalBlog, I thought I'd describe a method to help people set up their computers to use it without DNS names.

How to add important internet addresses to your computer.
I'm using the new SurvivalBlog.com IPv4 address change as an example, I also recommend adding your mail server, and other important host names too.

Audience:  I'll try and keep the techno-babble to a minimum, so that the largest audience possible can use this.  Any Domain Name Server (DNS) experts or System Administrators out there will probably pull their hair out over the following technical generalizations, but giving instructions on setting up a DNS cache server,  secondary out of country DNS servers,  or your own DNS/NIS/YP server, would greatly restrict the number of people that can use this.

A little background:  

Computers really don't use names like SurvivalBlog.com, they use something called an IPv4 address (this was simply called called an IP address before IPv6 came around). You don't see this function take place because a component called DNS has looked up the host name e.g.  'survivalblog.com' and converted it to an IP address for you.   Think of it as the world's biggest telephone book.  When you want to call a number you found in a telephone book, you type the number not the name of the company or person.  Your brain does this conversion; it sees the name, and looks at the number.  Computers use DNS to do this conversion for you.  By adding host names and their IP addresses directly to a text file on your computer, you can bypass the need for a DNS for those specific lookups.  So, if DNS goes down, your computer will still be able to look it up for you.