Mimic FQDN on a home machine not on a domain

Question

I have a home PC running Windows 10, no domain controller, and therefore by default I do not have a FQDN for the machine.

I am trying to setup some server software for testing purposes, and it requires that I use a FQDN.

How can I manipulate my hosts file to mimic a FQDN?

Extra info, please let me know in comments if you need more.

• There will be no other machines trying to access this other than the machine I am running the software on (my home PC)

• I also think that my IP address is not static.

Answer 1

I believe you can just add a host entry corresponding to the IP address of your machine to all machines that need to address it using its FQDN. The hosts file can be found in System32\Drivers\etc. Just add an entry with your IP and the host to it, for example 192.168.0.1 mymachine.local.

Another option would be setting up your own DNS server which is relatively harder. The biggest problem is presented by you not having a static IP address, you should either set a static IP or configure your DHCP server to reserve an IP for you based on your adapter's MAC address.