When running virtual machines under a Linux host system for testing web apps in various browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer), I found it rather tedious having to continually tweak the hosts file within each VM for the purpose of adding entries pointing back to the host machine's development web server address.
Instead the steps below will setup Dnsmasq on a Ubuntu 16.04LTS, 14.04LTS or 12.04LTS host machine for the purpose of serving both it's own DNS queries and that of virtual machine guests. Dnsmasq will parse the /etc/hosts file on your host machine where we will keep a single set of DNS entires to our test web application(s).
