Yes, I cleared my browser cache.

take a real address on the internet, put a fake entry to a live machine (your empeg) in your hosts file, see where it resolves.

Sunuvabitch. I changed my empeg entry to this:

10.134.75.122 www.bellatlantic.net

And when I type "www.bellatlantic.net" the goddamn verizon page comes up. But when I do:

10.134.75.122 empeg

Then my empeg comes up because it's considered a local address by the browser.

If I try to force a bogus non-local DNS address:

10.134.75.122 empeg.foobarasdfadesfas.com

Then when I paste that address into the URL box, it tries to do that microsoft-search-the-web-thingy and reports that they couldn't find that web site.

Crap, how do I tell my system that it's OK to use the hosts file even if the address is non-local?