In my occupation as a sysadmin, I often find times where I need to "game the system" by editing the host file. Doing so preempts any dns records for a domain name and allows me to make the ip whatever I want for a given hostname. This is extremely useful.
The downside to this is that every time I want to change that same hostname to a different IP, I believe I have to close the browser application before the change will take effect. In situations like chrome where I literally have 50-60 tabs open, this can get rather tedious.
Does anyone know of an alternate way to cause these apps to reload the hosts file?
EDIT -- I am speaking in terms of the Windows family of operating systems, specifically Windows 7 and/or Windows Server 2008R2 .