>Hi Guru's,
>
>We are trying to set up a Windows XP server and host through a screen
>scraper (tarantella) so when a user logs in, we want to redirect a host entry
>called "demohost" to a paired machine.  We want to set the host entry using a
>login script. 
>
>An example, we have 3 users, each logging in separately and concurrently. 
>If they go to the command prompt and type ping demohost, they should be
>pointing to different IP addresses.
>
>I know that there is one host file in the /etc/hosts directory, however, is
>there a way to either set specific host entries as variables or have a
>user/session variable to tell them to use a specific host file?
>
>Thanks!

"Steve Winograd [MS-MVP]" wrote:

> On Mon, 1 Jun 2009 15:02:01 -0700, Brent
> <Br***@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
>
> >Hi Guru's,
> >
> >We are trying to set up a Windows XP server and host through a screen
> >scraper (tarantella) so when a user logs in, we want to redirect a host entry
> >called "demohost" to a paired machine.  We want to set the host entry using a
> >login script. 
> >
> >An example, we have 3 users, each logging in separately and concurrently. 
> >If they go to the command prompt and type ping demohost, they should be
> >pointing to different IP addresses.
> >
> >I know that there is one host file in the /etc/hosts directory, however, is
> >there a way to either set specific host entries as variables or have a
> >user/session variable to tell them to use a specific host file?
> >
> >Thanks!
>
> If the users were logged in one at a time, the login script could
> rewrite the /etc/hosts file with information for the current user.
>
> I don't know of any way to do what you want for concurrent logins.
>
> How will each user access its paired machine?  There might be a way to
> configure that access.
> --
> Best Wishes,
> Steve Winograd, MS-MVP (Windows Desktop Experience)
>
> Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Program
> http://mvp.support.microsoft.com
>

>Thanks Steve.  Turns out I asked in the wrong forum, but perhaps you know...I
>am using Windows 2003 Server and not XP.  Not sure if that changes anything. 
>The problem is that the paired machine has is serving up web pages with image
>references to 'demohost' which if the host demohost was set to the paired
>machine ip, it would work.  
>
>We are hoping to do this rather than do a search and replace across hundreds
>of references every time we build a machine.  Also, we are having other
>issues.  The only way I can think of working around this is virtualizing each
>windows instance to get it's own ip, however, we were hoping to leverage a
>single windows server installation to accomplish this.  I have our tech guys
>investigating more options, however, a solution to having a single server
>acting like a "Multi-Tenant" enviornment is desired.
>
>Thanks again for the feedback!
>-Brent