I am behind a corporate proxy server/firewall, and this firewall seems to not be too happy with my idea of local development. On my home computer (Mac/Leopard), I have MAMP running, with a rule in /etc/hosts that directs dev.example.com to 127.0.0.1, and I have a virtualhost set up in the httpd.conf file which works great for me.
However, at work, I set up the exact same configuration, but am not able to access dev.example.com, likely due to some address/DNS translation going on via the proxy server.
Here are the relevant details from Terminal:
$ ping dev.example.com PING dev.example.com (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.025 ms
$ host dev.example.com Host dev.example.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
I've tried adding dev.example.com to the list of bypass addresses in System Preferences (the 'Bypass proxy settings for these Hosts & Domains' list), but that had no effect.
Is there any way I can develop locally using name-based hosts at work? I can access localhost, but can't get to the dev.example.com (or any other custom virtualhosts) here at work, which complicates other matters related to the sites on which I'm working...
Well, guess who's the village idiot? Me!
I decided to go back to the basics and see where I went wrong... turns out I had MAMP running on the MAMP default ports (8888 and 8889). Therefore, nothing worked when I went to dev.example.com on the default port (80).
Stupid waste of time. Oh well.