I am looking for the right answer to the above question. It has been asked by jmillikin at ubuntu forums as follows: Is it possible to create a hostname alias? Sort of like /etc/hosts, but with other hostnames rather than IP addresses. So that with some file like this, you could ping "fakehost1", and it would be re-mapped to "realhost", and then "realhost" would be resolved to an IP address. # Real host # Aliases realhost fakehost1 fakehost2 fakehost3 Somebody has answered about ssh. But not about ping, etc. My main purpose is to use it as an alias for svn server. In my case, realhost is under dynamic ip. So, "/etc/hosts" alias doesn't work. I want to access my svn server as svn://my_svnserver/my_repos instead of svn://realhost/my_repos. Thanks in advance for any advice.