PolicyPak Manage Windows Hosts file using Group Policy

Hi. This is Jeremy Moskowitz, Microsoft MVP, Enterprise Mobility and Founder of PolicyPak Software. In this video, I’m going to show you how you can create a GPO, link it over to your desktops and then manipulate the host file.

The host file is here on the endpoint. You can see it’s “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc.” This is the normal stuff in the host file. There are two ways that you can use the Pak here for the host file. Again, I’m doing this on the computer side, which is my recommendation. You can use it in what’s called “MERGE” mode or “REPLACE” mode.

For instance, if you were to add “192.168.2.22” as “host3” and then go over to your endpoint that has PolicyPak on it and run GP Update, what’s going to happen is that it’s going to add these three lines at the end of the existing file. I’ll go ahead and wait for Group Policy to finish here. Now let’s go ahead and take a look at that same file. There it is. You’ve updated the host file. That’s way number one.

Way number two is that you can change the “MODE” from “MERGE” to “REPLACE.” What that will do is obliterate the whole file and write in just these lines. Let’s go ahead and do that and see that work. We’ll just wait for Group Policy to finish here. If we take a look at the host file again, there you go. That’s it.

That’s a quick and easy way to use PolicyPak to manipulate the host file as you need to. I hope this helps you out. Thanks so much.