Do you have an internal DNS server?

I know of a lot of companies do something similar to this. You could set up a virtual host on the IIS server (i'm not sure how to do this, so I'm speaking vaguely), and point an IP/hostname combo to it. So, you could have an "Inventory" hostname resolve to the virtual host's IP address, make the virtual host's index.html (or whatever your index file is) actually point to the page containing your inventory.

The easiest thing to do is modify each of the client machines host file, adding an entry to the server's ip address to whatever name you want.

how, what, where, when. ok leave out the last one.

If you add the name to the company's dns server you don't have to do anything on each machine.

unless you have 500 workstations... :lol:

Seriously though, do what the other guy said and use DNS. If you really want to edit the hosts file on every machine its in:
%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Hello,

You GOTTA be kidding to edit the hosts files on all the machines. NO! By doing that, you loose all flexibility of managing the name if it should change down the road. Unless there would be a way to do it via group policy, don't even try to do that.

DNS is the way to go with this project.

Christian

Well, if you have WINS running on your network, you could also add a WINS alias and use host headers in IIS.

I use this regulary to publish short & simple, non-FQDN names for intranet sites, such as http://techhelp or http://benefits, and keep them all on the same server/IP address, without havig to resort to sub-directories.

Though you do have to have WINS set-up, its the same idea as DNS, you just dont need to worry about configuring DNS or having your domain suffixes set up correctly. However, it does only work in Windows environments, and you can only host more than one web server per IP address only on Server editions of Windows.

I'm just curious, what exactly is the point of that host file? I was checking out mine and the only ip listed is the loopback, but theres a huge list of domain names there. What's it for?

Operating systems use the local host file to resolve host names to ip addresses.