Google-chrome – How to tell Google Chrome to read a different hosts file

google-chromehosts-file

At work in my university, the computers in the office all use Windows XP, latest service pack. They've given each one of us a regular account, with no way of installing programs or making system-relevant changes. They have blocked many websites (YouTube, proxy sites, Facebook, etc.) simply by adding an entry for each one of them in hosts file, such as

127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.metacafe.com
127.0.0.1 metacafe.com

etc.

If I could simply tell Google Chrome to use a hosts file stored somewhere else then that would be it. I did read question 343158, but I can't set an HTTP server because of limited privileges on the machine.

As I could notice after reading the first answer, I needed to further detail my question, so here it goes: I have already circumvented DNS blocking in the past (the usual way) by first checking the IP address of a certain website at pages like this one and then I added the corresponding entry to the hosts file on my own computer, much like the following

92.123.66.131 www.metacafe.com
72.32.120.222 metacafe.com

and it has always worked for me thus far. For any site. However, this is a different case: I don't have write access to the hosts file, I can't install software, and I can't do pretty much anything that bears significance. I installed the portable version of Google Chrome because the computer only had IE, so I am looking for a way to make Google Chrome read a hosts file from a custom location, so I could build my own file (or perhaps copy the one I have on my laptop) and browse on top of that one.

Best Answer

When they block something, I would advise you to not try to circumvent it.

It might be that it's impossible to visit it by IP given that it could automatically redirect to the domain name.

  1. You could try to remember its IP http://66.220.149.11 or its long IP http://1121752331

  2. You could use an easy to remember URL, like: http://tiny.cc/f4c3b00k

  3. Browse Facebook through some kind of proxy, which should always work.

Again, I advise against this. You really don't want to work around their policies, they might monitor it...

You can probably figure out the same for metacafe, start with a ping metacafe.com.

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